ASCII player, personally. Part of it's due to habit, as I've been playing it ASCII since GH1 and prefer th'art style when it's available in a more general sense, anyway. I'm not entirely sure what the difference between the versions are for GH2, honestly. From what I understand, the facing and height display's unique (or at least more noticable) to the ASCII version, and is quite useful. A quick check looks like it'd be hella more easier to work weapon-arc with ASCII than SDL.
My system also has... issues... with SDL -- in pretty much every case I've ever used it, regardless of the coding otherwise, it's chewed up a massive amount of CPU cycles. It's been long enough that I don't remember if GH2 has the same issue, but at this point it's better safe than sorry; ASCII GH2 only does a CPU spike occasionally and generally just leavess my poor, loose bearing, fan cooled, CPU alone.
Going back a few versions (0623) and checking says yeah, it eats more. Not as bad as some are (Tome4, ferex, eats a minimum 50% of my CPU with the latest beta. The first beta ate the whole bloody thing, but played just fine when I cut it down to fifty via a cpu-throttling program.), but more than the basically 0% that the ASCII version consumes; maybe 15-20% on the 3d, bit less on the 2d. Further, the non-2d version's... weird. Everyting so smaalll. Well, perspective's good, I guess... anyway, I just prefer top-down to isometric, in any case. I'd absolutely adore seeing like, every isometric everything, ever made, converted to a top-down style. Efficient use of screen space can put the same amount of information in a smaller area, regardless of the format, imo -- though that's definitely opinion, and it can be a bit more complicated to do so.
Other things: ASCII appears to have better screen efficiency; more or less the same information's in a smaller space (see above, hah). I can see more of the map at a glance in the ASCII than in the SDL -- there are no spinners I cannot see the whole of in one screen, sans-scrolling, in ASCII. In SDL, the test character had to move around to see everything, which is a bit annoying; this is probably adjustable via .cfg, though. No clue how bad it is in-battle; ASCII already has issues with displaying the whole fight, but it looks like SDL might be even worse ;_;...
Well, anyway, SDL's prettier, I'll give it that. I just like my efficiency more than my pretty, heh, and ASCII's got more o'that, fer me. I think that's most of it, really. All that being said, though, I don't really have much experience with the SDL version. I will say it's much, much easier to compile in windows XP (Three mouse clicks!), not that I bugger around with such things very often.
