Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike

My first exposure to the Street Fighter universe came with, like the vast majority of people, the phenomenal Street Fighter II. I never had too much experience with arcades or fighting games growing up, besides my playthroughs of Simpsons, X-Men, and some game in which you play as a tugboat trying to get up a river at Chuck E. Cheese (back in the good ol' days when Chuck E. Cheese had some real arcade games, not just coin sucking ticket dispensers). But Street Fighter II was such a cultural phenomenon that even I couldn't have missed it. It was in 7-Elevens, malls, everywhere.

The one arcade to which I used to go as a teenager was a place called Wow! which you paid like 5 bucks to get into, but then the games were a nickel or dime instead of a quarter. There was also a selection of free games. One of these was Street Fighter II (well after the time it was popular), and I completely wore it out. I loved the look of the characters, the ease of control, and the spirit of communal learning that came about by getting your butt kicked by the great kid who could shoryuken at will, while the rest of us struggled to do the most basic of moves.

Anyway, I never really played any other Street Fighter games after that, as arcades were largely dying, and I didn't know about any of the other games. I played Marvel v. Capcom on Playstation, and would play SFII or one of the Alphas if I found an arcade, but my fighting game time was largely spent on 3D fighters like Tekken, Soul Calibur, etc.

But then, I purchased the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection for PS3 a few years back, in order to catch up on my Street Fighter history. Including SFII, Alpha 1-3, SSFIV: Arcade Edition, SF x Tekken, a Bluray with most of the SF anime and a documentary series, an art book, a wicked sweet Ryu statue and belt, and a game I'd completely missed, SFIII: Third Strike.

I spent a lot of time playing SFIV, but I spent more time playing Third Strike than I spent on the rest of the games and movies combined. It was completely captivating. Featuring a roster with very few identifiable characters to fans of SFII (only Ryu, Ken, Akuma, and Chun-Li appear in the game), I rather thought I'd play through the arcade mode with Ryu, Ken, and Akuma, and go on my merry way having beaten it.

But it was too good to drop. The visuals are superb, the introduction of parrying adds a dizzying level of technicality and skill to the game, and the characters are so diverse and well designed that it's very easy to see why this game blows SFII out of the water. While I hear that the arcade version slightly edges out the PS3 one, I absolutely adore it. If you like fighting games, you have to give Third Strike a shot. It's my favorite fighting game, a genre in which I have many loves. I'd give it a perfect 10.

-TRO