hmmmm . ok so noone plays aplha anymore. kinda sad but u know, on srk, haters galore. cant even make a damn vid without getin hated on. kinda sucks.
Alpha is still played in some areas. Who hated you and your vid??
your video was pretty goodyou should make a guy one for A2 as well.
Yeah…Alpha used to be the shit back in the day but now it’s falling off. I instantly got into 3S the first time I saw it. Still loved to mess around with A3 at the time but the presentation and style of 3S had me hooked. Problem was…this was way back when everyone else hated the shit out of it. It was tough to find people to play the game with and if I didn’t have a brother I’d have had no one to play it with. Least until I met my other gaming friend who I turned on to it.
I think it’s just now people are comfortable with other games (3S obviously) and the Alpha series just seems old’d. ST is old’d also but there’s a lot of newer SF players that were never able to experience playing the game competitively back in the day so I think that brought some new life into that game. Alpha 3 especially is kinda in the middle of just being too new to be nostalgic and too old to really warrant people flocking to the game again. Once people started to build scenes for other games the Alpha 3 scene in the US must have just slipped off.
There just hasn’t been anything to really convince people to get into the A3 thing again. GGPO did ressurrect A2 a bit but not really a huge push or nothing.
It’s not that it’s too new to be nostalgic, it’s just that it’s broke as hell. People understandably didn’t like watching players juggle each other 60 times in a row to win matches and it’s hard to ban that shit without banning mid-screen set-ups and post VC CC combos in some form or another, or giving the advantage to people with pseudo infinites.
Most places still playing it seem to be under the delusion that you can play it like a traditional pokes and footsies SF game. I’ve seen very few people who actually use VCs to their fullest potential, and when they do play someone who does, even though they don’t say it directly, you get that sort of “you’re ruining the game” look from some of them. A lot of people get in to A3 expecting something like ST, and what they end up getting is something completely different, which breeds a lot of discontent and out-and-out hate after they find a game they like better.
Even if you managed to get people to “flock” back to the game, I can guarantee you it would only take one CC infinite for most of them to drop it in disgust again. ST is timeless in a way that A3 will never be.
That and the fact that V-ISM is probably one of the least user friendly things ever. Check out some discussions about the game and you’ll find tons of people saying that V-ISM’s learning curve turned them off the game. Most people can barely do Sakura’s VCs let alone somebody like Dhalsim’s. With Geneii Jin and A-Groove, you don’t have to worry about people hitting neutral and teching, you don’t have to time things to catch people out of air recovery, you don’t have to worry about crouch/walk cancels, and with GJ you don’t even have to activate through things; you can just empty activate and start pressuring because getting hit doesn’t cancel the super, you can still block during it, and hell you can even combo off his command throw. You empty activate in A3, and your ass is getting supered or counter activated on. Activating in A3 is sort of like a really high risk parry and most people have enough trouble with those already. Most people just can’t get their head around some of the basic ideas behind VC/CC combos.
It’s not always the cleanest game at high levels either. Because of the weird hit boxes and the small guard meter, there’s a lot more brute forcing involved in winning than in something like 3S.
I mean I like the game, but I can see it for what it is, and timeless it ain’t.
So you’re saying A3 isn’t played because it’s broken and has a high learning curve?.. yet we still play marvel…
read his post again.
AND A3 and marvel are completely different games barely no resemblance to each other at all. You can’t compare them.
Indeed. People go in to Marvel VS games and Street Fighter games with completely different expectations.
If you tell someone they’re getting a car and you give them a boat, they’re understandably going to be upset about it, but there will also be those who figure “Ah what the hell, might as well take up sailing”.
Marvel and A3 may not resemble each other gameplay wise, but the reasons you listed for A3 dieing out can all be related to Marvel yet it is still thriving. You say A3 isn’t old enough to be nostalgic but it isn’t new enough to have players flocking to it. Well Marvel definitely isn’t old school, but I wouldn’t consider it new either(I’m not sure if we can consider a 7 year old game new school). You say the game is broke but I bet I can list more broken stuff within Marvel than you can in A3. You say A3 has a high learning curve, well marvel requires great execution abilities just like A3’s V-ism does.
I’m not trying to be a hard-ass or anything, but your points confuse me. Is there something I’m missing? Or is there just some magical property that Marvel has that A3 doesn’t?
Lol, you’re completely missing my point. I even reiterated it again above. I don’t think I can make it any simpler than I did with the car/boat analogy. I didn’t say anything about A3 not being new enough either. You’re confusing my post with DevilJin’s.
What I think Kyokuji means is that when you play a game called “Street Fighter Alpha 3” you expect it to play like Street Fighter, and when it doesn’t, you might be turned off from playing it, even if it’s a good game in it’s own right.
Why is it expected of a game to play “like Street Fighter” when the title alone gives it authority to not play like any previous Street Fighter game?
Sometimes i wonder if we are playing the same game … :wtf:
Have you watched the Ultimate Zero VI matches that DARK uploaded lately on his Filebank account (most likely the highest level of A3 you can get) ? You can see a lot of characters that have an infinite (Cody, Sodom, 2 Claw’s, Sagat, Ryu), and in those nearly 80 minutes you can see that … 6 times (roughly every 13 minutes). You can see VER doing it twice, Crusher doing it like 3 times, and Nekonohi doing it once (for only 4 hits, could’ve probably won the match with something else). It’s hardly a game breaking element.
How’s that a delusion ? A3 is very poking/footsie heavy, apparently important enough to be the 2nd criteria for the Vegascup tier list. I don’t exactly know what you mean with “traditional” (probably “without VC’s” eh ? 
), but that statement just isn’t true.
You call that “unclean” ? Why are you even playing this game ?
Why is it ok for Marvel to be broken just because people expect it, but it’s not ok for A3? Thats one hell of a double standard.
i don’t think it’s so much the fact that infinites are game-breaking. (they are more likely game-balancing) it’s the fact that people think ‘oh, alpha 3, that could be cool.’ then go watch a few videos on youtube and see a few infinites and go ‘OH MAN GAY’, and you get a huge groupthink phenomena where everybody assumes alpha 3 is completely broken by infinites, so nobody plays it, so nobody realizes that isn’t the case.
although i believe inescapable infinites in any aspect in any game are broken, that doesn’t mean they have to break the game. nobody in the top tier even has an infinite, etc.
also, marvel is pretty.
Yes, it’s all about perception. It doesn’t matter what’s true if people see it in a different light.
Still, part of the reason you don’t see as many infinites from the Japanese is that they got sick of juggling each other dozens of times, plus a lot of people had started counter activating to get out, so they came up with ways to bait flips and shorten the juggle time, while still guaranteeing a CC infinite if they don’t (plus it makes VCs more potent when the timer is low). A lot of them are also at a point where they’d rather go for a high damage VC/ender rather than a safe CC infinite set-up. I’ve seen VER, Neko and other players intentionally pass up easy opportunities to infinite in favor of trying to get them to flip even when they don’t have meter. Watch older videos from 2004-2005 and you’ll see tons of infinites going around. A-CHO used to have to fast forward through them all the time.
Most people however, are not at that level, and I can almost guarantee you that a mid-high level tournament would be filled with people getting infinited left and right by a select number of players, and especially any V VS A matches; people would see that and say fuck it. Most people in the US are not accustomed to playing like that, especially some of the OG players, and I’ve seen a lot of them get turned off the game once they realize they have to completely change the way they’ve been playing all this time.
People who want to play a crazy combo/meter heavy game are already playing Marvel. A lot of people who play SF expect something closer to the ST experience. There is a much smaller audience for games that fall “in between” extremes. Vampire Savior for example has like no scene, and people who want the A3 experience sans infinites are already playing CvS2 (though this is sort of dying down too). Not everybody wants to have to learn how to avoid those infinites, and even then there’s no 100% safe way out of them.
Yes A3 does involve a lot of footsies, that’s not what I meant. I meant that it’s not a SF game in the traditional sense. I don’t think I’ve played any other SF where you can lose a round right at the start based on one missed c. FK.
I didn’t say that was a bad thing. I said it changes the way people see the game.
He asked why people hate on A3 and I answered the question.
What you have is a broken game with a steep learning curve that doesn’t play the way people would expect it to. Why is anyone surprised that there isn’t much of a scene for it anymore? How many topics do we get on here from people who want help with a character, but don’t want to have to learn them on V-ISM?
If you can’t bring new players to a game, it’ll die. Plain and simple. That’s part of the reason why 3S is doing so well because it’s so accessible.
Yes, Capcom somehow realized that the average game was left behind. So 3rd Strike is a game that is easy to learn for beat’em up beginner. But capcom realized it too late I think.
Anyway back to Alpha 3.
I think the main problem it has is, that in the USA it was THE link game between old school and new school beat’em games. You have ST there were everything meets the eye. Everyone was used to this gamplay style. Then today broken games like Marvel and CvS2 are totally accepted. Why? I think it’s only becuase of Alpha3. It was very new and the USA accepted it at first but then got shown how to play it from the japanese. The USA players just never tried to addapt to the gameplay. I watch those b5 videos with Eddie Lee, John Choi and Alex Valle. Gameplay wise they’re very good. No discusion. But they didn’t really play Alpha 3 there. Alex Valle did not use a single modern V-Gouki VC there (past those days) but BAS did. And it that video infinites weren’t discovered yet. So the USA players had so much to learn and everyone seems to got disgusted by the infinites anyway. And for the USA it ok to drop this or that game. The only problem is that they have a huge impact on everything because of the english language. You don’t see this match-vid anymore, or don’t read about this or that game on srk anymore. Where else do you get infos and all that? (around 2000-2002) So Alpha 3 died also because of that.
But later on Marvel came. And if we compare this story to a human body now, then there was a disease and Alpha 3 was the immunization. The wake-up. The link game like I said. Marvel is broke, Alpha 3 not. CvS2 is broke, Alpha 3 not. But in those games it is accepted, because of A3. The community woke up and said:" hey lets do it as the japanese and let’s accept the bug and glitches, let’s play the game to it’S fullest potential."
But for Alpha 3 this insight was already to late.
PS:
Just my view on the history of Alpha 3 as a link game between ST to Marvel or CvS2.
Don’t want to offend anyone with this.
It’s just hard to believe for me that a whole mass of players could/can be that ignorant (no offense) in regard to A3, not realizing it’s depth. It’s a shame, because A3 has aged very well over the years.
No hope for A3 in the US ?
Not without some big changes, and even then it’s hard because a lot of the OG players are starting to retire as they grow up and have kids, etc., so there’s nobody around to promote the games as much anymore. I think a lot of them also feel sort of “done” with the alpha series as well.
Because the consensus says so.