Silverball guide · Street Fighter II
Save the easy shot for last
Street Fighter II hands you a menu of prizes and a jackpot worth 300 million. Which shot you leave standing decides whether you collect it once or over and over.
Twelve opponents and a prize menu
The game is a list. Twelve opponents, each tied to a shot, three of them lit at any time to begin with. Make the right shot while an opponent's name is lit and you have beaten them.
Every defeat then offers you a choice of two prizes, picked with the flippers — points on the left, something more interesting on the right. Take the interesting one. Always.
The points on offer are 5M or 10M, which is small change here. The right-hand column is Car Crunch, Roaming Ninjas, Count-Up, 1-2 Punch, a Double Score round, letters spotted in TORPEDO, GUILE or FIGHTER — and, on four separate occasions, multiball.
Take multiball every single time it is offered. If you dither for five seconds the machine chooses for you, and it always chooses the left-hand option, so indecision costs you the good prize.
The jackpot order is the whole game
Regular multiball has eight jackpots, one per shot, worth 5M, 10M, 15M, 20M, 25M, 30M and 35M — and then the eighth is worth 300M.
Two things make that eighth jackpot the centre of everything. It is repeatable: on normal settings you can keep collecting it for 300M a shot until the multiball ends. And your progress carries over — jackpots already collected and the value you have reached persist from one multiball to the next.
They also light in a fixed order, starting with E. Honda and M. Bison, then Sagat and Vega in whichever order you took the first two, then always Dhalsim, Blanka, Guile and Ken & Ryu.
Which sets up the decision this guide is named after. You do not want the last jackpot standing to be a hard shot, because you will only collect the 300M once. You want it to be something you can hit repeatedly — Sagat, Vega or Dhalsim.
So shoot the awkward ones early. Go after Blanka, Guile and Ken & Ryu while the jackpots are only worth twenty or thirty million, and leave an easy shot as the last one standing. Then farm it.
One small freebie: if the Blanka jackpot happens to be lit when a multiball starts, you get it for nothing, because the plunge feeds straight into the Blanka hole.
Torpedo Multiball, and the reason not to tilt
TORPEDO Multiball is a three-ball frenzy in which every switch on the machine is worth 3M — slingshots included, which is the only time they are worth anything at all. A routine one is around 100M and a good one is a great deal more.
You spell TORPEDO at the E. Honda and M. Bison holes when those opponents are not lit, two letters at a time if the double light is on, and you can take three letters outright as the prize for beating the sixth opponent.
Now the important part, and it is the sort of thing that only turns up in a rulesheet: the TORPEDO Multiball score is the only end-of-ball bonus this machine has.
So once you have played one, do not tilt. There is nothing else in your bonus to protect, and everything you just earned is sitting in it.
How to farm a frenzy
In a frenzy where every switch pays, the best shots are not the ones worth the most points — they are the ones that cross the most switches and buy you time.
Pick two, one each side, and repeat them. Sagat and Vega are the pair to learn. Sagat is a comfortable shot that passes three switches on the way through, so it pays around 9M a go, and it parks a ball off the playfield for a few seconds so you are only juggling one or two at a time.
Vega feeds the top pop bumper, which together with the green targets behind it will usually rattle out five or more target hits — call it 15M — from a single shot. It may light you an extra ball while it is at it.
Compare that with E. Honda or Dhalsim, which register only one or two switches a hit. Same effort, a third of the money.
The Champion Challenge
This is what the machine is actually for. Beat all twelve opponents and you reach the Champion Challenge, where all eight shots light at once and you have to beat all twelve again — on the same ball.
Twelve opponents only needs ten shots, because the lower right hole takes out M. Bison and Balrog together, the spiral takes Ken and Ryu together, and shooting Zangief and Chun Li raises the ramps to expose Sagat and Vega behind them.
Finish it and you get 500M, a special, and your initials recorded as the machine's Master.
Lose the ball during the challenge and the 500M is gone; you start again from the first opponent on your next ball. And be warned that the second time through the list, only two opponents are lit at a time rather than three, so the game gets meaningfully harder after your first challenge.
The double light
Every shot carries a small red double light, and when it is lit on an unlit opponent that shot pays twice — two TORPEDO letters from E. Honda instead of one, two GUILE letters, two barrels kicked at Sagat, two separate random awards from Vega.
Which shot is carrying it changes every time you hit a slingshot or the pop bumper. That makes it worth a glance before you commit to a shot you were going to make anyway: the same shot is sometimes worth double for no extra risk.
Vega under the double light is the standout, since its random awards include points, lighting the extra ball, starting multiball outright and spotting letters in any of the three words.
Where the extra balls are
There are several routes and they reward knowing the details, because this machine is unusually unforgiving about them.
The main one is the extra ball target at the back centre. Complete the three green targets enough times and it lights for only ten to fifteen seconds. You must hit the white centre target, not the red ones either side, and there is no grace period whatsoever once the light stops flashing. Hit unlit, the target is worth essentially nothing.
Spelling GUILE the first time also gives an extra ball, and 50M for every completion after that. Guile is one of the hardest shots on the machine with a very small sweet spot, though it can be backhanded from the right flipper.
The 1-2 Punch prize gives an extra ball the first time for completing Blanka and then Ken & Ryu, in that order, inside about twenty seconds.
The plunge, and a free ball you may not notice
The skill shot comes in two halves. First a timed plunge — release when the display says shoot, and how close you are sets your bracelet value at 5M, 10M, 15M or 20M for a bullseye. The ball then dribbles into the Blanka hole.
Second, you have to actually collect it: hit the bracelet target above the Ken and Ryu entrance from the upper left flipper as the ball feeds out. Hit the centre and it doubles. Miss and the bracelet turns into a hurry-up counting down to nothing.
And a quiet piece of generosity worth knowing about: if you drain within roughly the first ten seconds without having beaten an opponent, the machine simply gives the ball back.
A general caveat on all of this. The sheet these notes are built from was written in 1993 from one machine, and its author flags that several values — how many green target completions light the extra ball, how many Blanka hits reach a Car Crunch, some of the replay behaviour — look operator-settable or ROM-dependent. Treat the exact numbers as the shape of the rules rather than a promise about the machine in front of you.
Where this came from
Silverball wrote this, but not from scratch: it was compiled against the published rules below and checked against them, rather than written up from one person’s games. None of the wording is theirs. Machines get code updates that move the right shot, so a guide has a date on it for a reason.
- Street Fighter II rule sheet by Dave Stewart (public domain)
