Retro|Spective 127R: Street Fighter

[Nu-Eclipse]

I can appreciate the amount of stuff in SFA3 but for me the game is a no for me. Crap music and worse art design.

I don't think the music is that bad, though it definitely isn't as good as the Alpha/Zero & Alpha/Zero 2 soundtracks.

But yeah, the presentation sucks.

[Cassius_Smoke]

Alpha 3 on consoles had a world tour mode were you leveled up your character and had to complete challenges. That was a nice addition.
I liked the 2v1 mode too.

[Neon Ignition]

My brain knows SFA3 should be the peak, I like the stages and it has all the features and characters but if I'm to quickly pop one on for a go then Alpha 2 always takes the win.

[dataDave]

I'd argue that 3 has by far the best presentation. I love how refined the UI is, and how it updates on the fly with your character and -ISM selections. Then you have some flavour text intro for the story/guff leading into the progress ladder. The way each round starts with the various stings (which change colour, helping you never get fed up of seeing it) was way ahead of its time, and even trumps a lot of stuff now. Everything's perfectly designed. The only thing it's missing is fully illustrated story endings for each of the characters, although by that point in the 90s I'd long given up caring about that stuff.

2 has some nice music, although 3 brought hard percussions and synth (which matches the action perfectly) when mostly everything else on CPS-II/QSound up until that point had been overly melodic jazz/brass. It made for a welcome change.

[Neon Ignition]

Game 13 - Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper
Sliding back into the frequent revisions, an arcade update was released that added more characters: Deejay, Evil Ryu, Fei Long, Guile, Shin Akuma and T Hawk. Upper would find its way onto Game Boy Advance as well in an incredibly impressive downsized port that also added in Maki, Yun and Eagle as well bringing the roster of 28 fighters up to 37 with one more revision and one last airing of the Alpha series left to go.







Did this version genuinely Upper Alpha 3's game?

[Asura]

Did this version genuinely Upper Alpha 3's game?

The GBA version was genuinely amazing. If you're gonna be all Digital Foundry about it, yes, it was far from perfect, but it was an incredible achievement that really carried the gameplay to the platform.

It's just a shame that, as discussed earlier, Capcom basically killed Crawfish (IIRC; Crawfish delivered the game slightly late, and Capcom exercised their contractual right, in this instance, to withhold royalties; the game went onto be a big seller, everyone loved it, Crawfish were entitled to some of that money, but they went bankrupt before that happened and Capcom were able to pocket the cash).

[Neon Ignition]

I had it for a while and there was no arguing with the additions made to it, it was a clearly impressive entry. The biggest issue was definitely the choice of host platform which wasn't the best for playing SF on

[fuse]

What's your favorite or go to version ?

This is a personal feeling thing rather than a Digital Foundry breakdown, but the one I played first and have spent the most time with was the PS1 version. The Pocketstation mini-game was better than the VMU one too, from what I remember of them. I'm aware that the Saturn version is the one for technical accuracy (the DC one had some weird resizing IIRC?), but I didn't get that until a good few years later.

I've still not actually fired up the SF 30th Collection but that's likely the one I'd pick for ease, whereas if I was wanting to feel luxurious, I'd likely play the CPS2 version. Naomi is the only version where I have the game but not the actual hardware to play it on

[Nu-Eclipse]

Obligatory post about how Capcom did Crawfish dirty over SFA3U, as told by Nintendo Life.

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/12/feature_tales_from_the_frontline_of_game_boy_development

[Nu-Eclipse]

I purchased, sold and repurchased SFA3U a couple of times during my GBA-playing life.

Not sure I'd call it the P4P best port of a SFA game (I think the argument could be made for SNES/SFC SFA2 surpassing it, and SFA3DU/MAX on the PSP is clearly superior), but there's obviously no doubting the technical achievement from Crawfish, who had already shown what they were about with the similarly excellent port of SFA for the GB.

[Asura]

I purchased, sold and repurchased SFA3U a couple of times during my GBA-playing life.

Not sure I'd call it the P4P best port of a SFA game (I think the argument could be made for SNES/SFC SFA2 surpassing it, and SFA3DU/MAX on the PSP is clearly superior), but there's obviously no doubting the technical achievement from Crawfish, who had already shown what they were about with the similarly excellent port of SFA for the GB.

Yeah, but SNES Street Fighter Alpha 2 is like some sort of dark sorcery. It almost feels unfair to include it

[dataDave]

This is a personal feeling thing rather than a Digital Foundry breakdown, but the one I played first and have spent the most time with was the PS1 version. The Pocketstation mini-game was better than the VMU one too, from what I remember of them. I'm aware that the Saturn version is the one for technical accuracy (the DC one had some weird resizing IIRC?), but I didn't get that until a good few years later.

The Dreamcast one doesn't do RGB unless you hack it, even at that it's running at 480i, so goodbye native resolution and thus scan lines.

The Saturn port is the only one that runs at 240p resolution (besides the PSX), but then there are longer loading times, frame skips, and cut frames.

The PS2 version is probably the most accurate, but that also runs at 480i...

The NAOMI version came with unwarranted and unwelcome balancing updates, and I guess that too runs at 480i.

I personally used to play the PSX version the most despite having 2x DC arcade sticks, as that was preferable to having to hook up the VGA Box for the Dreamcast version which felt and looked like a dodgy ROM. The Saturn version came out much later, too late in my opinion. I bought it, but it never got much play.

It has to be a CPS-II board or a MiSTer, for me. Or even just RetroArch. There are far too many compromises to contend with otherwise. I have no idea why they went through a phase of trying to upscale sprites from 240p to 480i. Late 90s fighters and shmups are the visual peak of 240p gaming - at 480i they look like complete dogger.

The home version history of Alpha 3 is a bit of a mess. We never got around to the board when we had our cab, unfortunately (Although we did have Alpha 2), so this is another reason why I'm so happy with the MiSTer. I've been playing 3 a lot lately purely because I can finally play the definitive arcade version, on a pro CRT and blazing audio set up no less. I need a couple of joysticks sorting out but that's going to be well expensive.

[Nu-Eclipse]

Yeah, but SNES Street Fighter Alpha 2 is like some sort of dark sorcery. It almost feels unfair to include it

Ha! But it really isn't though.

SFA2 on the SNES is only doing what a lot of high-spec SNES cartridges did and compress the sh1t of the game data in combination with extra hardware chips in the cart. That and Capcom developed it themselves in-house. In hindsight, Capcom probably should've done that more often with the SNES ports of their arcade games (it might well have been the difference between SNES Super SFII being SNES Super SFII Turbo) but obviously didn't because the expense would've been prohibitive.

Fun fact: The perceived "loading" times in SNES SFA2 weren't actually loading data per se. It was actually an issue with the sound. Homebrew coders have since fixed the issue via emulation and got it running without any of the loading (CBA to find the YouTube vid).

[Neon Ignition]

Game 14 - Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max
The final form that Alpha 3 would take. This version of the game was a near accurate port of the arcade version but the effort was made to translate the fighters from the Upper incarnations to the same standard and then to also add Ingrid from Fighting Jam on top. Additional to this and some balancing, each fighter was given in-game storylines and endings along with a full compliment of modes including free selecting Dramatic Battle and Reverse Dramatic Battle modes. The only real catch? It was only made available via PlayStation Portable.






Did this final version take Alpha to the Max and was it right for the SFA entries to end here?

[Dogg Thang]

Maki, Eagle and Yun/Yang obviously were from other games and weren't quite matched to the actual SF Alpha characters. So while it was fun to have them and play as them, this is where they became clear extras rather than core to SFA3, if you know what I mean. It was one step away from adding the age-old Morrigan sprite. It was a great version and a huge amount of fun but, due to this, I'd never call it a definitive version - it's SFA3 with bonus features.