Oldish School - Street Fighter 3

[RabidYak]

I've fallen off the wagon again recently and have spent much of the last week hammering away at Super Street Fighter 2 and Alpha 2. Looking for a new challenge, I picked a fight today with the one remaining corner of the Street Fighter franchise that I havent already played to death - Street Fighter 3. Having never seen any of them in an Arcade and not managing to get into it when I had a DC because of the crappy joypad, i've only played a limited amount of SF3 compared to SF2 and SFA and i've never really made much of an effort to change that as the character roster always put me off somewhat.

So I looked on the net to find out how well it runs in the current version of Chankast (over a year old now, looks like we've seen the end of that), dusted off the dodgey CD-R copy of Third Strike I downloaded when the first version was released and programmed a keyset into my X-Arcade that doesent clash with a stock windows GUI. The game runs pretty well in the emu - just a few minor graphics glitches, an annoying between round sound bug and some stuttering on the between match screens. The lack of a scanline filter grates a bit, but its not a showstopper and I wouldent expect one anyway from an emu that was only just out of the gate before it was shot.

Moving onto the game itself, I found it surprisingly enjoyable now that i'm playing it with the proper controls rather then an arthritis-inducing frisbe. I still don't like half the characters, but i'm only going to be using them as punching bags and its good to have a relatively unfamilar set of oppenents to get stuck into.

For those that don't know - Ken and Ryu were the only returning characters in the first version of SF3, Akuma was added in Second Impact and Chun came back in Third Strike. Everybody else is new, althougth one of the Andores from Final Fight is one of them and there are rougth equivlents to a few of the other SF2 folks (the afformentioned Andore being the Zangief-style grabber, theres a couple of Dhalsimish bendy guys, a Boxer and a Guile-type French bloke). My only real gripes with the new characters is that the boss is one helluva cheap mofo and that a few of the regular characters look like they dropped out of some wierd Japanese cartoon.

Graphics wise, the SF3 series is the best Capcom fighting games have gotten with nice newly-drawn sprites all round and plenty of animation. In the sound department, the effects are good and the music is decent. Its a joke to think that they went back to knocking out low-budget horse beaters after producing something with this sort of production quality.

I particularly like the fighting engine, its pretty much like a modernised version of SF2 with all the better elements of the Alpha series added. Its got good pace to it and theres a decent amount of technicality, but it has more of SF2's skill and accuracy then SFA's looseness and flashy combo battery.

Overall, Third Strike is a very good game that I may consider migrating to permantly if there is ever a new DC emulator that doesent have the niggling bugs or if hell freezes over and CPS-3 gets emued. Its well worth serious investigation if you have acess to it with decent controls and the character roster shouldent put you off, especially if you play one of the 4 older guys who did make it into the series.

I'm too bone idle to take screenies, so heres a link to some at gamespot - http://www.gamespot.com/dreamcast/action/streetfighter3thirdstrike/screenindex.html

On a side note, I just ordered a translated version of a big Japanese book about Street Fighter thats meant to have all the artwork and a load of info about all the games. I'll post some comments about that when I get it if anyone is interested.

[adidas]

Yak, my worst gripe with this series is the cheap boss. And the fact that some of the old favorites are not on here.. although that may be good, because you don't want to beat them to death.

I just play it on DC with the shit pad.

[Class316]

Didn't know that Chankast could run it that well. hmmm.

[Silverhaze]

Thanks for the review Yak, that was a nice one!

Having stepped out of the SF loop for a long time I could never get into Double Impact and 3rd Strike. I got them on DC but could never get the hang of the sort of parry and counter moves they introduced.

Before I played either of those 2 games the last SF game I had ever had a decent go of was SF2 Turbo on the SNES.

I did start getting into it but was totally put off by the cheap arse boss with his regenerating skank tactic. I have one of those awful clunky DC arcade sticks which just made the experience even more frustrating as I strugled to pull off a fireball without jumping.

If I ever get a decent controller for the PC then I might have to give that another try.