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Review: Street Fighter Anniversary Collection |
You know, I wasn’t really interested in this collection when it was first announced – but then, I didn’t know that SF3 would be included in the package either, nor that it would be online. In fact, I first heard of the whole online development at my local game shop, where I was browsing through all the new titles that had come out that week. The owner of the store clocked my discerning eye running through these new titles, and he quickly pegged my attention.
‘Hey, you! We’ve just got that new Street Fighter collection in here, and it’s online, no less. I think that would be right up your alley,’ he said. ‘I hear lot of things are up your alley, if you get my meaning.’
Ignoring the discomfiting leer he sent my way, I gave it some due consideration. Street Fighter 2 might not have been overly tempting to one as wearied of it as I, but Street Fighter 3 – on Xbox Live, no less – certainly was and interesting proposal. However, if it played in the same laggy way as Capcom vs SNK 2 did on Live, I knew I would never end up playing the bastard online, and I had SF3 3rd Stike for my Dreamcast already.
What to do, what to do?
‘Hmm…’ said I. ‘Storekeep! Bring me that box, so that I might ponder my potential purchase.’
He didn’t do so right away, however. I watched in befuddlement and horror as he stapled it to his groin and began swinging it around lewdly in my general direction. ‘You want it, don’t you? Yes, you know you do you little slu…’
‘Excuse me mister,’ said a nearby child, cradling a copy of GTA: San Andreas in his little paws. ‘I’d like to buy this.’
‘Why, certainly young boy. You wouldn’t happen to want a copy of the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection as well, would you? Just reach out and take it. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.’
As if on cue, riot police kicked down the door and stormed the room. ‘Nobody move, perverts!’ they yelled. ‘Get down on the floor, NOW!’
‘Huh?’ I said, swinging to look at the new force that had come into play. One of them immediately took my action as that of an aggressor, and shot me in the head at point blank range with a rubber bullet, causing my skull to cave inwards and dent my brain. I felt myself go limp, and teetered over to a nearby window, just managing to tilt myself over the sill and crash limply to the pavement four stories below.
I’m not entirely sure how much time passed at that point, but I managed to painfully drag myself into a nearby shop, shocking the till attendant with my broken, bleeding ways. ‘Jesus, man, are you okay?’ he asked, running over to help.
‘Ah,’ I gurgled, somehow talking past the blood in my lungs. ‘One copy of Street Fighter Anniversary Collection for Xbox, please.’
And that, dear readers, is how I was talked into buying a game I had little previous interest in! And you know, it’s funny how things work out sometimes, because all the pain and burst arteries was worth it in the end – the end product, as they say, is awesome.
So! Off home, and SF3 3rd Strike was placed into my Xbox with trembling, unsteady hands.
Hey, they were suffering extensive nerve damage, after all.
So! The story is about… hell, I don’t know, really. Alex is the new main character, as he has been since the original SF3, and… well, that’s about all I know. Gill wants to take over the world or something. It’s nothing worth following, certainly, and like most fighting games, is utterly peripheral.
Upon loading the beast up, you’ll be greeted by a vast collection of fighters. Many of which are rather crap designs, admittedly, but there are some old favourites in there like Ryu and Ken to keep old school players happy. And not all the new characters are hideous – while I wasn’t a great fan of Alex at first, he’s quickly risen to the top of my favourite SF characters after learning what he’s capable of, and Ibuki’s not so bad either.
The point is, that even if you look at the roster and go ‘GAH! WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?’, it’s likely that you’ll warm to a few of them at least. It is a bit of a shame that the designers saw fit to take back Akuma and Chun Li and yet totally ignored the wonder that is Cammy (Delta Red, of course), but I guess that sometimes you have to roll with the punches – or occasionally have one like this splinter your teeth into nasty little shards, but I guess it’s bearable given the pure fightey fightey action contained within.
You see, SF3 plays really, really well. This is a game that gives my personal favourites KoF 98 and Mark of the Wolves a run for their money as the best 2D fighter out there. It is STUFFED FULL of awesomeness, much of which is not apparent until you take it online and learn the sheer depth involved in the game.
First off, the game looks beautiful. Mark of The Wolves may have enough animation to rival this game (and B. Jenet, naturally), but the resolution and clarity given off by the character sprites and backgrounds falls dead flat in comparison to SF3. This is just the best looking 2D game available – Guilty Gear might have a higher resolution, but the animation isn’t up to these unholy standards.
The sound’s okay as well, generally. Some tunes are slightly poor, some are excellent, and Elena’s is simply dreadful. Even so, it generally won’t make you want to turn down the volume, which is a good sign, and both the announcer and sound effects are spot on.
And so, we come to the gameplay. It fucking rocks. HARD. It’s deceptively simple at first – you can only choose one super move per game from three available to each character, there’s no running or rolling or air blocking, and there’s a new parry move apparently thrown in for the hell of it. And then you go online, you learn what the characters are capable of, and the game opens up in the joyous manner of a treasure chest filled with awesome treasure.
Take Ibuki, for instance. She doesn’t really play in the same fashion as the other characters – she has chain moves in the manner of Darkstalkers, she can juggle opponents off a hard sweep and then do an ‘aerial rave’ type manouver, and her taunt increases the damage of her next attack by about 50%. Her air fireballs can be jabbed out of the air, and… well, play her and see.
Then you have Alex. Slow, lumbering, and possessor of one of the nastiest 2D combos I’ve ever seen. With a well timed Stun Gun headbutt he can reduce your energy bar to ashes – and since all the supers in the game have different charge lengths, he can recharge it rather quickly, hit or miss. In fact, he plays more like a KOF grappler than a Street Fighter one – His throws aren’t instant (he’ll be beaten to them by Hugo, for example), but he has a huge range of strikes and overhead attacks backing him up.
And Ryu and Ken. They’re different from each other now – so very different. You won’t notice it at first, and you’ll probably marvel at Ryu’s power in comparison – especially with a well timed Shin Shoryuken backing you up. Then you’ll get caught out by Ken’s cross up combos repeatedly, and notice he can store three of his Jinrai supers in comparison to your one, and you’ll go and check him out as well.
More important than the disparity between the characters is how plain ‘good’ the game feels. The hits are solid, the collision detection is perfect, the throws are well implemented – if perhaps a tiny bit too powerful, since they’ll often cut through attacks – and the general feeling you get from playing is one of sheer bliss. As I said, it just feels right. Try complaining about the effect of a well placed Shin Shoryuken – go on, I dare you.
And that parry I mentioned earlier – once you get that down, as I have not, you’ll see some crazy, match turning events through the use of it. Parrying a Denjin Hadoken when you have no life left is one of the greatest feelings ever to come from a fighting game. In fact, go here and listen to the crowd – and imagine that the Ken player is, in fact, you.
hxxp://media.shoryuken.com/srk-daigo.zip
Isn’t that just the most awesome thing ever? Well savour it, since you’ll never be that good.
Still, the fact that it plays like a dream isn’t all there is to it – there are all those online opponents still waiting to challenge you.
Online play is generally as smooth as a porn star’s behind. Approximately ninety percent of the matches I’ve had have had such little lag as to be utterly negligible. And hey, if you get a bad connection, just drop out of the match after it’s over – there’s enough players online at the moment to ensure you likely won’t have to wait long for another match.
It’s here where you’ll likely refine your play style – in fact, it was getting molested by Alex (not literally) that caused me to fall for the big, sweaty grappler (again, not literally). He’s as powerful as hell – not top tier, exactly, but great fun to play as and damaging into the bargain. Most of what he can do, I’d never have found by myself – and the same can be said for Ibuki and Makoto. Just learning what they were capable of doing online expanded the amount of characters I was willing to use by a fairly large margin.
There are some niggles with online play, though. The lag doesn’t pop up often, so I won’t hold that against it – however, many players just pick the same character over and over again. Ken’s over picked, but I don’t mind that so much – many players complain that he’s the ‘Jin’ of the game since everyone picks him and he’s supposedly a little overpowered, but he’s not so bad, really. He’s not the most overpowered, nor the most boring to fight against at any rate.
Urien is.
As I said, it’s not that he’s overpowered - he’s just remarkably boring to play against. Unlike most of the other characters in the game, nearly everybody you’ll encounter on Live plays Urien in exactly the same, yawn-inducing manner.
Fireball – high Fireball – Charge – Aegis – throw. Over and over again.
OVER AND FUCKING OVER AGAIN, YOU BASTARDS. STOP IT NOW, IT SUCKS ASS.
Chun Li’s also overpowered, certainly more so than Ken. Ever seen someone win a match by walking into the corner and spam HP with the odd jump kick in order to win against grapplers? I have, and it’s not exactly what I would class as the definition of amusing. She does too much damage, she links into supers and specials too easily from fast, far reaching normals and her priority is off the scale – and stays off the scale, even when the move is finishing up. No wonder almost nobody picks her online. And that second Super art… beh.
Special mention must also go to the music which plays while you’re waiting for a match – it’s horrendous. You know, a few years back I got hit by a train and had all my internal organs rearranged by a drunken tramp claiming to be a doctor, who only got them to stick back together again through his infernal use of the Dark Side. Every second I exist in this world is yet another moment of mind-bending agony for me to endure, and I have to say that the daily pain I go through really is nothing compared to the sheer torture of this tune. Here be a sample:
Select and make your first pick (let’s get it on now!),
10, 9, 8, 7, 6 (let’s get it on now!),
Choose and pick your best one (let’s get it on now!),
5, 4, 3, 2, 1 (let’s get it on now!)
And this repeats, over and over, until a match is found. Normally it doesn’t take long, but on a day off from work or whatever when there’s less players around, muting the TV is a valuable way to preserve sanity.
Seriously. I’d take MvC 2’s ‘Gonna take you for a ride’ over this any day – it’s that hideously annoying.
Those are the only flaws I can see with online, and I’ve went into detail to try and make the review sound a little less biased. Some of those ‘flaws’ are admittedly personal, like the music complaint, and possibly won’t annoy you as much as it did me, so take them as they are and spice according to taste.
So, where are we? We’ve covered that it looks and plays beautifully, that the online aspect is expertly implemented, and that the characters will likely grow on you. We’ve covered that it’s a deep, deep fighting game with plenty to learn, and ignored the slight disappointment from having no lobbies or rooms where you could spy upon another match from and comment like the sage you are.
So, it’s pretty much covered then. If you have an Xbox and Live, go get this now. If you have an Xbox, go right out and buy Live for this game alone. You’re a fighting game fan, right? Then get out there and prove it – it’s selling for a bargain price, and it’s extremely rare that you’ll come across a title of this quality selling at a standard price, let alone siginificantly less than the usual.
Without the Live aspect, this collection would lose a horrendous amount of awesomeness points on a near-seismic scale. SF3 would be relegated to merely being an impressive fighting game with a lot of depth – it doesn’t sound so bad on its own, but without the regular, smooth and varied competition that Live offers, interest would more than likely quickly wane as quickly as it did with the Dreamcast release.
As it stands however, this is simply one of the purest, most satisfying fighting games you’re ever likely to experience, even with the few balance issues it has and the overabundance of Urien players you’ll find on Live. There are leagues of depth to this game, and it’s an absolute blast to play. You’ll learn awesome combos from your opponents which you can then integrate into your own game. Having SF2 and the SF2 anime merely sweetens an already spectacular deal – especially if you’re interested in playing them at all.
So, Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike. While it was cruelly overlooked when it first came out, if there’s any justice in the world it will not be overlooked again. It looks great, it plays great, and by God – it is great.
Go buy it. I command thee!
