Video Games: Mushrooms? Magic]: Rupert Goodwins reviews the latest batch of Super Mario and Streetfighter packages

THERE'S no better way to make money from classic rock music than to repackage the old favourites as CD boxed sets. Super Mario All Stars is the first video game equivalent - four of the most famous games for the original Nintendo console shoehorned into one cartridge for the SNES. The graphics are more colourful, more detailed and better animated, but the games remain the same: Super Marios 1, 2 and 3, and an extra collection of studio out-takes previously only released in Japan, Super Mario - The Lost Levels.

With more platforms than a glam- rock revival, Mario's remastered adventures are as infuriatingly moresome as ever. The Brooklyn plumber's task is always the same: to run, leap and tumble across the sort of obstacle courses a Royal Marine would eat his beret for.

Ageing hippies will ponder the significance of the psychedelic fly agaric mushrooms our hero chases across the screen - like Alice's perception-altering fungus, they produce changes in size and increased power. Wandering tortoises sap the strength of the diminutive New Yorker, while an ever-compounding set of puzzles and reaction-testing manoeuvres always give the player something new to think about. A new feature lets you save the state of a game for later resumption rather than having to start from the beginning every time, a common frustration.

Magic mushrooms aside, Super Mario All-Stars isn't so much the Pink Floyd collection of the gaming world as Phil Spector's Greatest Hits. Wholesome, entertaining and infinitely consumable, Mario's machinations prove that good basic ideas will continue to satisfy no matter what the technology can do.

Street Fighter II has been one of the most successful games to date, and any good sequel deserves a sequel of its own. While Hollywood usually has a problem with the plots of follow-up films, the original game neatly pre-empted this by having no plot whatsoever. Instead, a selection of fighting characters attempted to beat the living daylights out of each other using an improbable mixture of magic, martial arts and good old-fashioned upper cuts.

Street Fighter II, in Turbo or Champion edition, is more of the same. There really aren't many differences between the two. Sega's variant has a group battle mode, where teams of players slug it out in turn, but everything that matters has the same look and feel. As you get better at pressing the right controller buttons for a double-forward flip with combination Turbo Spinning Clothesline, you can increase speed to prolong the useful life of the game at the expense of the useful life of your synapses.

Unlike some other combat games, there's little blood or gore; more choreography than decapitation. The backdrops for the fights are particularly sumptuous, although there's little time to admire them while a 304-pound Sumo practises his flying head-butt on the remains of your torso.

A good game for therapeutically channelling all the stresses from a hard day at the office. Intellectually, though, even Police Academy 5 shows depth, sensitivity and awareness by comparison.

Street Fighter II Turbo (SNES) pounds 59.99, Street Fighter II, Special Champion Edition (Sega Megadrive) pounds 59.99, Super Mario All Stars (SNES) pounds 49.99

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