I’d have forgotten about SF and KOF if it werent for arcade and console emulators.
where I lived I couldnt even spot a SFA cabinet. Only Tekken, VF, MK and some SNK games. Had no idea SFIII series existed or even KOFXI and Battle Colosseum. I only knew about Capcom vs SNK from reviews in magazines, since I couldnt spot a cab either .Saw 3S when I traveled to London and it didnt feel like SF at all.
I remember at that time I was more impressed in the arcades with GG XX Reload rather than 3S. Such stylized anime graphics were something unique at that time
Still, the franchise in the late 90s wasnt faring that well. Both SF and MK after countless sequels began to lack innovation and the audience’s interest shifted to 3D fighters, new franchises (MvC, GG, Capcom vs SNK) and consoles.It was destined to happen. SNK didnt fare well either.At that time if you didnt own a console there was the alternative option of visiting the arcades to play fighters cheaply. But after a while, owning a console became mandatory since arcades closed too. PC emulators were the only choice for those who didnt have that much money.
I really didnt care about SF4. didnt own a console and wasnt available in arcades of my area either. And graphics were even more irrelevant than those of 3S. I only bought AE few years later.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, but 3rd Strike really is the best game ever made with no flaws whatsoever. Some people just don’t have that ascended ability to unlock the 3rd gate of their mind’s eye which is needed to understand the complexities of SF3, so they just play baby games. All other games are absolute GARBAGE. If you don’t like 3rd Strike, then you’re an idiot and fuck you.
Another reason SFIII never took off was because of CPS3 encryption. You couldn’t bootleg it and arcade owners were starting to get pissed off that they kept having to buy (what they thought was) a new version of the same game. It also wasn’t that easily available on console in some regions either. I think there was only one location in my entire country that had 3S, and the cab was never maintained. Our main local arcade had NG and SI, but the owner refused to get 3S, and I don’t blame him. It was expensive to import and NG and SI just weren’t that popular. I tried playing it but there was never any competiton. Noone was going to invest time in a game that could only be played at one location in the whole city, especially considering how different it was to previous iterations (style and character roster).
Everyone was either playing T3 or A3. Mostly because most of them already had the game on PSX so they could practice at home. And partly because CPSII could be bootlegged so there were more locations that had A3.
also CPS3 is more subject to failures and deaths compared to CPS2. While both share the dreaded suicide battery, CPS2 is quite less likely to get damaged by tension spikes and is protected by its big sturdy case while most CPS3 boards are the caseless version.
God knows how much I fear for my CPS3 everytime I take it around xD
I know right. Pardon me for bad paraphrasing from the real sources. Probably was “good reads” but you can be creative in different ways and do what you want over optimal, only-do-this stuff.
Stuff I missed last year when sf3:eek:e came out just grinding away online. Good content.
I cant believe people are still bringing this up in 2013 .America doesnt like games you can put a lot of thinking into but japan does thats why MARVEL 3 is so successful because the game is so dumb anyone can play it
I can’t imagine that the SFIII series was that much of a commercial failure. Do commercial failures get ported to like five different consoles? Also the game was consistently in Arcadia magazine’s top 10 most played until fairly recently (or is it still?) and that’s well over a decade after release. I don’t know enough about how much money gets made out of selling new cabs and PCBs, but getting that much play means your game is fucking popular and I don’t think you can really do much better than that, looking at it from a purely arcade perspective. Maybe it was a commercial failure because Capcom never made a SFIII cartoon series, complete with an action figure line.
It wasn’t a complete failure. It it was a total failure they wouldn’t have made 2I and 3S. Games that bombed rarely ever get sequels. When 3S came out -as been repeated over and over- arcades were dead in America and people moved on to 3D fighters. It didn’t help that the game got very little promotion and wasn’t ported until 1999 on Dreamcast, and again in 2004 on PS2. Plus it was in direct competition with it’s own franchise with the Alpha series and then the EX series.
I always wonder what if the Developers were allowed to continue tweaking 3S for arcade release. I know the 2nd version of 3S removed Urien and Oro’s unblockables but weren’t they working on a 3rd version with additional tweaks?
