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Street Fighter Alpha 3 Review
Noel Brady
00/12/0000
Capcom's pinnacle fighting title appears on the Dreamcast, is it any good, of course it is.
It's an unwritten law of gaming that everyone must play a Street Fighter game at some point in their life, and Dreamcast owners now have the chance with the ultimate in the Alpha spin-off series. There have been more updates and upgrades than we at CSF, or most people for that matter, can't remember how many but what we can remember is that each title has brought something even better to the 8 year old series.
33 characters from all over the world, each with their own special reason for entering the tournament have come together for the ultimate in fighting games. They must all now fight one another and find out who is the very best of the best. There can only be won and the battle is going to be tough but each fighter has trained for months and is now ready. It may sound like something that we've heard billions of times before but Street Fighter brings a little class to the beat-'em-up genre that no other game can claim to have. That's why any Street Fighter game is so special.
Sharp graphics and vibrant colors have always been strong points of the Street Fighter series, and SFA3 definitely delivers the goods in this department. The characters and backgrounds are drawn with expert detail and the intriguing color contrasts show that the artists at Capcom really know what theyâre doing. If youâre familiar with the arcade version of SFA3, you pretty much know what to expect from the Dreamcast version; the conversion is just fantastic.
You play the game with a total of six buttons, giving you three strengths of punch and three strengths of kick. Though it can be fiddly to get to grips with, having six differnet attacks gives loads of scope for pulling off exactly the right move at the right time. But here's where a slight problem turns up with the conversion: there just aren't enough buttons on the Dreamcast's analogue pad for the game.
As well as using the usual X, Y, A and B buttons on the face of the pad, you also need to reach the L and R triggers on the underside, which is extremely tricky when you must press more than one button at a time. As such, you really need to buy either the excellent Sega Arcade Stick or a third party pad with six buttons on the front. If you're already a fan of the series, then forking out the extra cash shoukdn't be too much of a problem, but it's still going to put off some casual gamers.
Though there are 33 characters, they haven't been included or rushed just to make the numbers- many of these guys have been evolving and developing over the past nine years, and are some of the most recognisable and likeable characters in the world of videogames. Golden oldies such as Chun Li, the Cinese detective out to avenge her father, or Blanka, the electrically charged Brazilian searching for revenge after M. Bison turned him into a monsterous freak. Then there's Cody whose still wearing a prison unifrom and handcuffs from his jailbreak just before the tournament.
For Street Fighter Alpha 3, a new feature known as ISM Select has been added. This means that you can play each fighter in three different ways (A-ISM, X-ISM and V-ISM), effectively giving you a grand total of 99 characters to master. The differences are too subtle for most players to worry about, but Street Fighter veterans will love the opportunity to play their favourite fighters with the original Street Fighter 2 abilities.
The sound is also rock-solid. SFA3 retains the seriesâ "ha-doh-ken"s and "yat-ta"s but backs them up with meatier thumps and smacks that are sure to have neighbors complaining. The music is surprisingly good compared to the "techno lite" soundtracks that accompany most home fighting games. The tunes feature good contrast between highs and lowsâ”sort of a drum-and-bass primer for the fighting game fan.
On top of all the arcade features, the Dreamcast game also has a new World Tour mode to give lonely souls an extra challenge. Here you take your chosen hero around a world map, battling enemies to order and winning extra abilities and strengths as you go. You can save all your details to VM, then use your custom fighter whenever you want. It's a great way to learn a new character from scratch, and will really test you to the limit on the final stages.
So we've got another top fighter on the Dreamcast then and this time it's from the greatest series of beat-'em-ups ever. Though it doesn't have the 128-bit flashiness we're used to, it's got some of the most finely tuned gameplay ever seen. As for those who haven't touched a Street Fighter game in years, and think that one game in the series is as good as the next, you really should come out of retirement and at least try Street Fighter Alpha 3.
