Evolution 2008, Part 2: Street Fighter 3: Third Strike

Now I will introduce the second game in my self fulfilling articles about the Evolution Fighting Game Championships. That game, is Street Fighter 3: Third Strike.

Street Fighter 3: Third Strike (3S for short) was released in the arcades in 1999. It was the third revision of Street Fighter 3, the first two versions being Street Fighter 3: The New Generation and Street Fighter 3: Second Impact.

The SF3 series had three notable differences from past SF games, two of them aesthetic and the third a game play change.

The first difference was the graphics. SF3 ran on the new (at the time) CPS-3 hardware, which allowed for sprites that were much more fluid. In fact, the sprites graphics were so good that they held up against newer 2-d graphics until just recently.

The second difference was the cast. SF3 had all new characters like Yun and the new hero character Alex. Only Ryu and Ken returned from the original cast. In Second Impact, they brought back Akuma, and in 3rd Strike brought back Chun-Li. Other new characters were introduced in the later two revisions like Hugo and Twelve.

The third difference, and probably the most important difference since it's a game play difference, is the introduction of parrying. To parry attacks, you must press forward right when your opponent attacks to parry his attack (for low attacks you have to press down to parry it.) Parry not only stops the attack, but gives you an opportunity to strike back (as you would expect from a parry) There are other game play features not in the original SF series, but parrying is the biggest.

When it first game out, 3s was a commercial failure. Casual players missed the old characters and hated the new ones. Tournament players thought the game was bad, and didn't like the parry. Some people still don't like the parry, because it goes against SF's traditional emphasis on spacing games, since you could parry to lessen or neutralize the spacing game.

But then in 2004, two major events happened that would boost 3S's popularity within the fighting game scene.
The first, was the U.S. vs. Japan 3S 5 vs. 5 team battle, where as you probably guessed, 5 U.S. players went up against 5 Japanese players. Here is the short version of what happened: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA GOT RAPED BY THE JAPANESE IN STREET FIGHTER 3: THIRD STRIKE!!!!!!! For the first time, people saw how much more the game had to offer, and saw how far behind we were the Japanese. U.S. players wanted to get as good as the Japanese, and so strove to become better in the game. (While the gap isn't nearly as big as before, I think the Japanese are still better so far).

The other event happened at Evolution 2004. Instead of telling you, I'll just show you. Here is the famous "parry incident" from a match between Justin Wong (playing Chun-Li) and Daigo Uhmehara (playing Ken)




Basically what happened is that after this happened, everyone who saw this got the game (which was released on the PS2, another thing that helped the game grow), and wanted to be like Daigo, trying to parry Chun-Li's super. Of course, that isn't going to happen for most people (including me) but regardless, despite that many of the new people playing may be scrubs, the video helped the game grow.

As for the 3S scene, it has to be the most popular in the U.S. because of the said events. If it isn't it's at least the most popular at the tournament, since it usually gets the most players.

As for who takes it, it will probably be a Japanese player. Unless I wasn't paying attention before and missed something, I am pretty sure an American has won (we have had some people close, but no cigar) Hopefully the U.S. wins one this time.

Well usually I end with a video, but since I already put one up, Ill just say see you next time.