Street Fighter 3: Third Strike Online editions is just what it sounds like… Street Fighter 3 with online play. For 1200 Microsoft points or roughly 15 dollars on the PSN you get an arcade perfect version of Third Strike. Anything else? yes, there is. 3SO is a massive gift to the fighting game community. Nearly everything this game holds is tailored to make things more intuitive, but a bit more on that in a moment. Third Strike, is an incredibly polarizing game among Fighting game fans. It changed things up from Street Fighter 2 a lot, The roster holds nearly no veterans, and the ones that do are changed enough to feel really different. Plus, the newcomers are bizarre…very, very bizarre. From the Electric stretch Armstrong known as Necro, to the hyper-active Andre the Giant homage Hugo (and his infamous manager Poison) This roster is strange in character. Not only that, many of the newcomers are strange in a move set sense as well.
Many characters have a combination of slide motions, Charge motions and circle motions, while this does not mean much to no fighting game fans, SF2 had move sets comprised of mainly one style, as did the subsequent Street Fighter 4 and countless spin-offs. This is one of a number of challenges in terms of the stiff learning curve this game holds. Complex move sets, Very tight frame window’s for combo’s and the biggest issue for newcomers to SF3 the extremely challenging defensive game. Where the Capcom fighting games are concerned defense is usually predicting where to block, up/down or left/right and grapple breaks with finding windows to punish. Third Strike brings an entire new element to the table, and that element is parries. Parries are a prediction based defensive option, by pressing forward to parry a high attack and down to parry a low attack with precise timing you ignore all damage and have a frame advantage to punish your opponent. Parries, coupled with faster attacks make things incredibly difficult. 3SO has you defensively predicting blocking high, low, left, right, Parry high, parry low, parry in the air, parry left, parry right AND potential grapple breaks for normal grabs. It is absolutely mind boggling for a rookie to get past. This…game…is…DIFFICULT!
Rewarding, but difficult, good god has this game frustrated me. You mess up against a good player once and you are easily in trouble of losing a round, even more so than the typical fighting game. You will be very discouraged as a new player in this game, it is daunting, however when Ryu throw’s a Shinkuu Hadouken at you and you full parry it you feel like a champ. Of course, then you get smacked by a flying kick because you are in awe of your awesomeness and get KO’ed. Much has been hyped up about this game’s online net coding, using the fan favourite, fan made GGPO net code for near lagless online. It works within reason, if you fight somebody from Japan as a Canadian…there will be some snap back, but it will be much better than essentially every online fighter on the market. The many, many features this game holds for convenience character select screen button config, many dipswitches to customize the game play, many little options. A bunch of display options and a gallery full of music and art. and a bunch of trials, created by a professional SF player…this package is stacked, for sure. This game is a tough sell for newbies, but it is amazing once you get into it, very rewarding and incredibly fun. Now for 15 dollars is it worth it? I would say yes, yes it is. Not a game of the year candidate by any means, but a fantastic throwback to an often forgotten, often disliked fighting game classic.
Playstation Network : 15 dollars
Xbox Live Arcade: 1200 points
Playstation Network : 15 dollars
Xbox Live Arcade: 1200 points
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