Retro|Spective 127R: Street Fighter

[fuse]

Game 17 - Street Fighter III: Third Strike - Fight for the Future

Whenever I'm put on the spot to name my favourite game of all time, this is what usually comes out of my mouth. I would say there are more clear reasons that SF3 is my favourite SF overall (parrying shaking up zoning fundamentals, the look and feeling being timeless) than there are specific reasons Third Strike is my favourite of the SF3 series, but it does feel like the best iteration to me, and as the current and most active, has always been the obvious go-to.

It is *such* a good game, and I love how it manages to retain its feeling as a SF game while also forcing you to re-evaluate every single scenario you trained yourself to deal with in SF2. The character balance isn't perfect when you're talking about top-level play (and let's face it - none of us are that good), but even then there's still plenty of room for almost all of the roster to do some work. The characters themselves are great, too.

Naturally you can't really talk about the impact of the game without giving credit to 'moment 37'. While I'd enjoyed playing it before, this new attention on it forced me to re-examine the game, to play some new characters, and to really appreciate it on a whole other level.

[speedlolita]

The greatest.

[Neon Ignition]

Undoubtedly the best of the SF3 entries and with the exception of Alpha 2 and 3 unrivalled in the series up until this point too. I find value in revisiting New Gen but Third Strike is definitely the go to installment and the closest we got to see to what post-16bit 2D sprite games could look like. It's held back by some of that remaining unpleasant SF3 era visual design and soundtrack choice making though that keeps Alpha as more immediately appealing.

[dataDave]

I was going to get back into 3S but I missed out on a pristine MadCatz TE from Ebay that went to someone else for €36 because of some shipping address setting, and now I'm really angry.

[speedlolita]

Oh you'd probably want a faster PCB anyway. Pretty nice chassis though, especially for that price.

[Cassius_Smoke]

Like I'd said before, it's the only iteration of sf3 I've played. It's incredibly well made and plays really well. It's a real looker too. But it just never grabbed me in the same way the alpha series did or Capcom vs SNK2 (which I played the **** out of). Yeah I dunno why.

[Asura]

Admittedly, I think if you stack Street Fighter III: Third Strike against the fantastic Capcom Vs SNK 2, you have something of a classic fighting game design dilemma.

I think Third Strike is only really fun if you want to get pretty good at it.

A great analogy for this in 3D fighting games can be found in comparing Virtua Fighter and Tekken.

Tekken eventually "won" because Tekken's appeal is extremely broad. It didn't matter if you were the sort of person who goes to fighting game competitions and pours over frame data, or if you're just a few mates who only play it post-pub, and otherwise only own the latest CoD and FIFA. There were characters and design decisions made in the Tekken games which made them fun for people of all skill levels.

Conversely, though I love it, I would be first to hold up my hand and say Virtua Fighter is a boring game if you're not into it. Button-mashing causes the characters just to flail about, and even an intermediate player can carve up a beginner without much effort. There's little chance of upsets, like how in Namco's fighters, a beginner with Eddy Gordo or Maxi can eke out a win through luck and a bit of timing.

Virtua Fighter's "skill ceiling" is higher; but almost no-one will ever actually reach Tekken's anyway.

This isn't to say "you're just no good at it" if you don't like Third Strike. I just mean that I feel the game isn't built to cater to everyone. Conversely, Capcom Vs SNK 2 is fantastic because its roster is so huge and options so numerous that anyone can play it and have a good time.

[Neon Ignition]

Game 18 - Street Fighter IV
A long gap and the franchise finally returned, making the main line transition to 3D but avoiding the gameplay gimmicks that many series had attempted. Here, the aim was to simply deliver a modernised true sequel and the result was a massive hit. Aimed to come in closer to the classic SF2 experience, the fourth game was closer in appearance with several new fighters introduced who were less 'out there' in design than those from SF3. The console versions delivered an initial roster of 25 fighters in total making it the most generous initial numbered entry too.







Was SF4 the right move forward?

[Dogg Thang]

SFIV is pretty fun to play but the game lost a lot for me in the move to 3D. I don't think most of the characters look great and the animation is often so soft and just less deliberate (as in nobody would have chosen to draw some of those frames - they're awkward inbetweens via the soft interpolation). Losing that strength of animation was a real downgrade for me and, even though it's largely cosmetic, it definitely always affected my perception of this game and I never really bonded with it.

Some of the new characters were pretty good though and, for me, perhaps worked better because they were designed for this 3D medium. Or maybe that's just that I had no 2D incarnation of them to compare them to.

[Asura]

I assume we're talking about Vanilla IV here, based on how the thread has previously worked - because I have very different feelings about the different versions.

I was very excited for IV. I got to play it in Japan, when it first hit the arcades, but only briefly before I came back to the UK, and it was around 6 months before I got to play it again (with the exception of a quick go at Eurogamer Expo that year in-between). I pre-ordered it, and was ready with a fightstick when it arrived.

Honestly I really enjoyed it at first. I'm in two minds about @Dogg Thang's point, though.

Firstly, because as someone who had played it, and knew that it was totally solid, I found myself in heated forum discussions (I think it was on the old GameFAQs forums) with people who were determined to "prove" from the early videos that because the game was 3D, that it was "really" Street Fighter EX4 and wouldn't play like a proper game in the mainline series. They presented all sorts of ridiculous "5+5=150" analysis which I kinda crushed, but as I didn't have any real proof, I was just telling these people they were wrong (which is never good).

I liked the visuals of IV. I totally agree with DT's point that the 3D lacked some of the substance of Third Strike, and I believe, in some ways, that it wasn't until ArcSys spun up their new 2D3D process that anyone managed to try and address that. But I did at least think that SFIV was visually good, in that it had a clear, consistent visual style (again, we're talking about vanilla 4 here), and in that regard it succeeded. My only real regret there was that the "ink splatter" stuff in the early trailers was only loosely there in the final game, and those early trailers gave the impression it would be more widespread.

As for the actual game? Mixed bag. The fundamentals are excellent, but it had flaws. Firstly, on a basic level, the game lacked lobbies in its online mode, which was pretty much inexcusable in that era, so long after Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate had made it work. Maybe they were added in a patch? My memory is hazy. But it definitely launched without the feature, which was a shame.

The game itself had a few creative choices that would affect the rest of the revisions, too. The game had "autoswitch". This was a feature where, if a character jumped over you/moved from one side to the other, and you input a move, your character would turn auto-magically to face the correct direction to pull off the move. This feature was incredibly generous and was one of the main reasons why the early days of the game were absolutely dominated by Ken and Sagat; characters with dragon-punch-type moves with generous invulnerable frames were buffed by this decision.

I may be wrong here, but I think the "reversal window", i.e. the timing to instantly transition into specials when getting up from knocked down was very generous, much more than most games in the series. This basically means that players who are playing as characters like Ken, if they try to perform a reversal, should never fail to do it (which was very much possible in Street Fighter II, which is what piano-inputs and negative-edge are for in this scenario).

There were others; I don't remember exactly what they were, but these were fundamental reasons why Sagat was so crazy powerful (plus he did get a bit of a nerf).

On the whole though, I played hundreds of hours of it, so it would be disingenuous to say I didn't love it... But for me, SFIV really got off the ground with Super.

[fuse]

SFIV always felt very surreal. It never quite looked how I expected it to, and the wait getting there meant it felt quite disconnected from my memories of the other games. That said, I enjoyed it loads, had a great time playing it, and loved how much attention it brought back to the genre.

Did I play it through every single version as keenly as I had at the start? Nope. Do I enjoy it as much as 3S? Nope. Do I still think it's a great game, and enjoy watching high level play at any opportunity? Yes!

There were others; I don't remember exactly what they were, but these were fundamental reasons why Sagat was so crazy powerful (plus he did get a bit of a nerf).

There are people that will chew your ear off for hours about this, the highlights as I remember them being;

• Generally ridiculous damage output and high health
• Fast fireball recovery and a kara-uppercut that covered half the screen
• That same uppercut > FADC > ultra combo Ryu uses, but with an added step kick in the middle
• Time your anti-air to trade and you can don't even need to FADC to land step kick > ultra (this is filthy)

[Asura]

There are people that will chew your ear off for hours about this, the highlights as I remember them being;

• Generally ridiculous damage output and high health
• Fast fireball recovery and a kara-uppercut that covered half the screen
• That same uppercut > FADC > ultra combo Ryu uses, but with an added step kick in the middle
• Time your anti-air to trade and you can don't even need to FADC to land step kick > ultra (this is filthy)

Oh, there was one other specific to Sagat, I think was also nerfed. Sagat's ultra was a combo which finished off with a big uppercut; however, the bulk of the damage came from the last few hits.

General convention in Street Fighter is that in those multi-hit supers, they have to connect on the first hit to get the full damage in, and if they don't, the super movement often changes to a much weaker one; or certainly, if the rest of it connects, it's much-compromised.

Sagat's uppercut Ultra eschewed this. If nearly any of the early hits connected, the uppercut would connect and do the bulk of the potential damage.

[Neon Ignition]

Game 19 - Super Street Fighter IV
Focus attacks and super combos where the move focus here along with Ultra Combo's though the biggest addition was that of ten more fighters to the roster. Eight came from prior entries with Hakan and Juri being new characters, the latter in particular striking a chord with the fanbase. Ono stated that this was the definitive incarnation of Street Fighter IV with no intention on it receiving another updated incarnation...








Was this good enough to have been considered a good way to wrap up SF4 at the time?

[Dogg Thang]

I had this on the 3DS, which probably wasn't the best system to experience it on. It was okay.

[Neon Ignition]

Yeah, l I played the 3DS version quite a lot but for the console version it received a lot less time as when it came out... to be honest, I didn't fancy paying out again despite the lower price because I didn't believe Ono... rightfully as it would turn out