| | Double port of the first two arcade versions of Street Fighter III: "New Generation," and "2nd Impact - Giant Attack." The juggernaut known as Street Fighter II and its later incarnations (Hyper, Super, Championship, etc) ruled the arcades for like six years. Finally a full sequel came out, and it was...weird. SFIII boasted really fluid animation that still holds up quite well by modern 2D fighter standards. The first version, "New Generation," had only ten characters, and aside from a few stalwarts like gosh-darn Ryu and Ken, came with a pretty funky crew, like a dude who seems to be made out of rubber, a leper with a laser eye beam or something, a dance-fighting African tribeswoman, and a very proper British boxer who fights in a tuxedo. It also introduced a game-changing new mechanic: press forward just as an incoming attack is about to hit, and your character parries it away, leaving the opponent open for a counter-attack. Parrying in the thick of battle isn't easy, especially against moves that hit multiple times, so it's certainly a maneuver that separates the scrubs from the dedicated students of the game--one reason why the game seems to hold a special place in the heart of the hard-core. "Giant Attack" added three characters to the roster, which isn't really a big boost (although a couple of them are big, interesting characters: the colossal and sorta rubbery German, Hugo, and the nearly naked, um, godlike dude, Urien, who can shoot meteors from his hands. A lot of the backgrounds changed, which was a nice touch for the sake of variety, I could swear the gameplay was sped up a tad, and another major new mechanic was added: if you do a special move, like firing one of Urien's meteors, with TWO buttons instead of just one, it becomes an "EX" move that, at the cost of a power stock, generally moves faster, farther, and hits harder. While they're pretty much trumped these days by the next sequel, "3rd Strike," which brought in six more characters, the first two are still pretty interesting games in their own right. Oh, and they have neat win screens: the defeated character, all bruised up, sits hunched on the ground in the foreground, while the winner, standing tall behind them with the sun lancing down over their shoulders, mouths a pithy win quote. As in I think all their ports of games that ran on the "CPS" arcade hardware, which had many more horizontal pixels than a standard resolution home screen, Capcom seems to have compensated by pre-scaling the graphics down to the DC's resolution; this actually came out looking pretty decent; although you can see artifacts of omission here and there if you look closely, like the slightly darker outer row of pixels around a character not being complete in all frames as they animate, it isn't really easy to notice unless you're really looking for it, and you'd pretty much think the game is running at its native resolution, which it most definitely is not. So good job there by Capcom. |
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| | (Correction: 3rd Strike added five, not six, characters: Chun-Li, Q, Remy, Makoto, and Twelve. And the third character added in 2nd Impact was Akuma, playable as a secret character--as well as a powered-up "Shin Akuma" version.) |
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