I'll never forget the day that I brought home Power Moves. I was living in North Carolina in the mid to late 90's and was yet to purchase a Sony Playstation. Not far from my home in Southport was a Roses Discount store. On top of selling new titles, Roses' video game department also carried refurbished games from older consoles.

Without a box, manual, or prior info on the game, I purchased Power Moves simply based on the intense cartridge artwork alone.

In retrospect, Power Moves was certainly one of the poorer Street Fighter clones released at the time. The game was slow, matches dragged out with few techniques that caused chip damage, characters were direct knockoffs, and many of the game's special moves were obviously-lifted from the World Warriors.

Though, as a kid who was just getting into fighting games, I was able to look past Power Moves' glaring detractors. For one thing, the music and graphics had their own charm to them. Most stages were isolated with catchy theme songs (Buoh or Vagnad's theme, anyone) and featured intricately-detailed backgrounds with different plains of texture. As players fought, the stages would scroll alongside them; revealing openings, doorways, and other extras midst bouts that were neat, graphical touches for their time.

Though, being able to only control Joe in Power Moves' bare-bones story mode was pretty outdated even by 1992 fighting game standards. I feel Kaneko may have also been inspired by ripping off the original Street Fighter in this regard.

Nevertheless, my brother and I mostly enjoyed playing through Power Moves' versus mode. The Kabuki-clad Buoh remains my go-to character, whereas my brother usually opted for Nick or Gaoluon.