Street Fighter III Third Strike

Ok technically this could belong on a PS2 forum of some kind, but I'm officially claiming it's Dreamcast.

See I had SF3TS on my dreamcast want list for a while. But the DC version goes for like 60 dollars. But They released that SF anniversary pack on the PS2 with SF2Turbo and SF3TS and I picked it up for 15 dollars.

Now I'm going to admit, I have never been a fan of Street Fighter. Ever since the dawn of fighting games, I remember playing it at a friends house and never being impressed. Mortal Kombat on the other hand was an instant hit. Fatal fury wasn't too bad. But never quite got street fighter.

Yet it is "universally" considered the best fighting game of all time, the whole line. All other fighting games are measured up to it and never achieve it's level. Who decides this bull?

Anyway, SF3 looked pretty good on youtube videos and reviews so I wanted to give it a shot. I actually had found ST3 double impact at a thrift store for a dollar before. But I didn't play it too much since I intend to find third strike to devote my time to.

Well, my first impression is that I don't really like the art. The character art style just doesn't jive with me. I like my anime to look like ranma or sailor moon. Fatal Fury has good character designs. But all the girls in SF are not attractive at all. That's half the pleasure of fighting games is monster vs. eyecandy.

Now there were a couple monster things in this game as well. I don't know what place they have in the street fighter universe. I don't remember either van damme or jackie chan fighting these guys. But they turned out to be my favorite, and had good animations to go with them.

But I was shocked at how small the moves list was. Some only had 3 special moves. What is this, 1993? They have some bonus moves but they only work if you have a full power guage, and you have to get beat up for your power gauge to increase (huh?).

And then my biggest beaf with all street fighter games (except alpha). They are VERY unforgiving in button sequence. You have to be damn fast (faster than PoS2 controllers can do! Luckily I have some arcade pads) and perfect. No slop at all. And what you think is fast, that still isn't fast enough! You got 0.5 seconds to roll the thing 8 times and land at exactly 325 degrees and then hit ABXBXABBXSY. They are too hard to pull off easily during a match. I get killed while trying unsuccessfully to pull off the moves over and over again. And how do I get killed? Because the computer opponent is throwing some fireball at me continuously for the entire round.

And the moves in general aren't very exciting. For the amount of blood, sweat, and motherloving beer it took to pull of all three special moves, they were unimpressive and did little damage.

Before that I played Soul Calibur II and III I just picked up, and I actually liked both of those quite a bit. I played them side-by-side assuming I'd just keep the better, but they were both different enough and good I think I'll keep them both. And Soul Calibur DC. And Soul Blade PS.
 
Kuta said:
So you didn't like the games much but did were you into the movie?

I've always been a fan of van damme movies. And steven seagal, sylvester stallone, arnold, etc.

The van damme street fighter movie was quite terrible. I think all his post SF movies went downhill pretty fast. Except desert heat, that movie grows on you.

I'm also a fan of jackie chan (and jet li, and just getting into sonny chiba, and I like that Tony Jaa guy), and we were watching City Hunter and thought it was hilarious when they all turned into street fighter characters and had a long battle scene.

The Anime Street Fighter II V I thought was awesome.

But the anime movie for Street Fighter Alpha was terrible. The art/animation was like budget saturday morning import.

I haven't seen that new chun li movie yet. Any good?
 
A couple of thoughts: you can't play third strike without an arcade pad and you need to dedicate many many hours to finely tuning the craft.

Unless you love fighters, it's not worth it. Also, part of the fun is rocking a live opponent, not a CPU. The CPU tends to play the same way all the time.
 
Interestingly enough, I do love fighters, play them a lot, but for some reason always suck.

There have been a few fighting games in the past I've devoted considerably time into. And even after mastering a character and beating the game, my friend can come over with little experience and still kick my ass. I'm just missing something.

But since I do love fighters, I own very very many of them for many systems. In the past I could devote myself to one. But now when I actually get a chance to play, it'll put in an hour with a friend to one game. And next time it will be another game. So it's really necessary that the game is relatively pick-up easy.

Now I'm not a button masher. By pick up I don't mean just craming buttons and cheezing the fireball. I print out the special moves lists and we run through a few practice rounds with a character to learn the special moves and try to pull off some of the super-special attacks or fatalities, and then move to another character once we've seen all the moves. And I'm tired of getting my butt wasted. I always pick the cute girl and he picks the giant behemonth and then I complain about losing.

But if we play a game and run through a dozen characters and can't pull off more than 25% of the moves, we figure something is wrong.

Now sometimes it is the controller. For instance stock PoS controllers suck in all regards. And I've had some 3rd party d-pad controllers for normal systems that somehow are incapable of registering directions right for special moves. I've had some amazing times where just switching a controller makes the difference between special moves being easy and impossible.
 
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