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Mzo

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition (XBLA)

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Now this... This takes me back.

High school days at the local arcade; a smoky and rough hive of villainy and scum, but the only place you could play Street Fighter 3 until the Dreamcast version years later. I don't know if those were specifically "the" days, but they were days to be sure: Days full of wonder, adventure, and really horrible people that had to basically sit on your lap to play against you. If you beat someone with sweeps alone they could punch you right in the face. Good times.

Now we have the luxury of playing the same game in the comfort of our living rooms, which I will gamble and say contain 90% fewer used condoms and syringes. We can beat people in really embarrassing ways on our arcade perfect joysticks with impunity. It is a glorious future

IS WHAT I SHOULD BE SAYING, but Capcom is such fat, stupid trash. To be fair, I should probably say that Iron Galaxy is fat, stupid trash, but whatever. "What did they do wrong?" you might be thinking. "Why are you so mad all the time? Are you going to use that syringe? I found a used condom between your couch cushions, that's really gross. When can I see my family again?" In reverse order: never, sorry, yes, and let's review:

1. RANKED MATCHMAKING

Broken shit. Here is how ranked matchmaking works in Street Fighter 4, the fighting game Capcom released 3 years ago:

You have three basic options. The first is quick match, which attempts to find you a match, any match regardless of rank or latency, by joining an existing match as quickly as possible. You should also note that it NEVER WORKS.

The second is custom match. You set the parameters (country, rank, etc.) and are then presented with a list of potential competitors along with (and this is important) their latency. Choose one and off you go. There's always the risk that the match you chose has just been filled by someone else's search, but oh well, you can quickly try again. It's great.

The third option is to create a match and wait until someone joins it. This also works very well.

Ok, now here is how ranked matchmaking works in Street Fighter III: 3S OE:

Quick match only, and an admittedly buggy version of quick match at that. In other words IT DOESN'T. If every fucking star in the sky somehow lines up into a giant, magical cock constellation you might actually find a match but guess what? It has red latency and trust me, you will have more fun sticking the ball end of your joystick into your dickhole than fighting this one out.

2 - PLAYER LOBBIES

A must-have for any proper fighting game that strives to not be a shit pile. Make a room for up to eight people to take turns fighting, winner stays, shit talk is endless. How could they fuck this up? I have to admit, it took effort but they managed.

When you first join a lobby, you are a non-entity in perpetual last place until you tap the A button to check off the empty box next to your name. Now you are Ready, and eagerly await all the benefits that this new rank entails. Good so far.

Say you're up next, challenging the winner of the last fight, but nothing is happening. Confused but aided by years of menu usage from other games you tap A. Now you're no longer ready, get your ass to Mars. The correct answer was to wait an arbitrary amount of time until the game decided to start a countdown to the match with no prompting from the players whatsoever. You fucking idiot.

Say you've just won a match, you tap A reflexively to skip the win quote and let the game know you're ready for the next fight WRONG, back to Mars.

Here's the best part. You're watching your buddies fight and you're up next. Suddenly that Big Gulp gets the better of you and you run to the bathroom. Your bowels decide that shit, as long as we're here we might as well take care of some serious business and a one minute break stretches out to say, 5 or 10 minutes. Back on SFIII, your turn is up. Since the game not only prefers but fucking DEMANDS inactivity as proof of readiness, your match starts.

Was even a modicum of thought put into this? No. Did anybody test this system for even the one second required to see how stupid this design choice was before release? No.

3 - NEW ART

If you're porting an existing game that happens to be fucking gorgeous and have reams and reams of official art available: FUCKING USE IT. Creating new "art" and placing it alongside something this classic is the height of presumption. It's like the Harmonix bands slipping their awful songs into the Rock Band games. Fuck off with that.

Speaking of music, every remix is claw out your ears, pile up their remains and burn them bad.

4 - GGPO

GGPO is kind of crazy but everyone who cares about fighting games already knew that. Rollbacks and fake out announcer KOs all day. People don't seem to realize that normalizing latency means there will ALWAYS be latency, it just won't be so damn variable. Overall it works well but SF4 does it better.

The game is still a blast to play locally or even with friends in a lobby, once you get used to the rules. It's just amazing that a team of people could somehow be so ignorant of basic design or that the game received no testing whatsoever on the online front, but whatever.

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Updated 02 Sep 2011 at 08:17 AM by Mzo

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Comments

  1. Chux's Avatar
    that's ignorant

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