When I first saw Street Fighter III, at the bottom of Sega World in the late Nineties, I instinctively hated it. Sure, it had Ryu and Ken, but I didn’t know who Dudley and Alex were, and wasn’t entirely sure why I should care. Street Fighter Alpha 3, which was just across from it, was much more to my tastes. Like many gamers, I had misjudged Street Fighter III because it wasn’t familiar enough.
I returned to Street Fighter III: Third Strike on the Dreamcast some years later. This was quite a long time ago when Retro Gamer hadn’t yet hit the shelves, when I ran a Dreamcast website and was aiming to review every PAL game on the system. The first thing that struck me, which had passed me by all those years before, was just how beautiful the game was. I’m not sure why – maybe it was the fact that it was a 2D game in a world where 3D was still in the ascendancy – but this time, the incredibly fluid animation struck me right between the eyes.
The next thing to hit me was just how well it played. Sure, it was missing many favourite characters, but the new ones were perfectly interesting replacements. Better yet, the overhauled fighting system gave me so many more options – EX moves, parries, super jumps and more. Mastering this gave me the ability to dominate most of my friends, with the exception of James who proved to be a strong rival – we’d match each other frame for frame in mirror matches. Those matches were the ones I’d look forward to most – the ones which really tested me as a player.
A few months ago, the Retro Gamer team had a games night, and we were joined by Play editor and fighting game fiend Luke Albigés for the evening. When Third Strike went on, we had some very heated games and it brought me right back to my teenage years, when I had more fun than I could have initially imagined with a game I thought I’d hate. I love Street Fighter III: Third Strike for its beautiful visuals and its exquisite game design, but most of all I love the lesson it taught me – it’s always worth giving a game a second chance.
