alpha 3 = 8 stun per hit regardless of strength
alpha 3 upper: short hurricane = 6 stun per hit (6 total), forward = 4 stun per hit (8 total), roundhouse = 3 stun per hit (9 total)
I’ve also noticed that certain move priorities are different. For example, M.Bison’s Psycho Crusher SC could sometimes be beaten by a jump attack in SFA3, but in SFA3U, ALL jump attacks are out-prioritised making it an extremely good anti-air move. Try it yourself and see.
Has anyone noticed any other changes in move priorities?
How does the whole invunerability thing work anyway? 'Cause I’ve been sweeped out of bad sprays plenty of times.
Also, what’re you referring to when you say “inflection”?
It seems that they tend to tweak more than what is needed to be tweaked. What would have been preferable to change, if necessary, in a newer version of the game?
I don’t like what I read about Rose. She had already been altered heavily from her Alpha 2 version, and then they further and further take away any semblance of strength she had left. Mash out of Aura Soul Throw Level 3? Yeah, that kind of defeats the purpose of the whole attack. Maybe they should just have Soul Throw do absolutely nothing and you just leap into the opponents arms and get knocked out.
Anyway though, here’s a Sim change I’m unsure of so I need a confirmation.
st roundhouse whiffing. I think some characters that couldnt crouch against it, can now, and some characters can stand having it also whiff. So Sim lost alot of those abusable spacing options.
Guy’s qcf+punch punch grab works deep in the corners. i.e. when you do chain into strong-fierce qcf+fierce fierce in the corner, instead of elbow always connecting, you get slam. It’s not 1p or 2p dependent.
Also, IIRC the FF Chain timing was much much more lenient.
I think in Upper the differences between 1p and 2p were removed or changed.
IMO it seems like Upper is/was a great idea, but since nobody plays it… then it’s discarded.
I think it’s the removal of CC’s that turned most people off. I think people could live without the infinites, but non-VC CC/Walk cancel juggles added a lot of depth to the game.
Erm Kyokuji, crouch cancels were actually still present in SFA3U (all versions, including Saturn, PSX, Dreamcast and Naomi). They were removed in the SFAA version, but you could use a dip switch to turn them back on again.
I think people should have given it more of a chance. Capcom obviously made changes that made the game more balanced, but people just can’t cope with change. They’ve spent hours learning a certain technique which gave them a competitive edge (albeit unfair), and when it’s taken away, they can’t take it. That’s why SFA3U was doomed to fail from the start. Such a shame.
I’m pretty sure at least one version of Upper was missing CC’s.
That could be part of it, but honestly VC’s are part of what helped balance the game. People who normally couldn’t anti-air very well or defend against certain things had tools now. Without reliable activations, Chun’ and Dhalsim would dominate the game pretty badly, which would suck since both are way more beginner friendly than they need to be.
There’s been debate about how solid a game A3 really is without VCs anyway. There are a lot of really screwed up match-ups without VC’s in place, and I personally think it has a pretty sloppy footsies game because of how everything seems to have very specific hit properties. Air attacks have wayyy too much priority for my liking as well.
It’s always seemed like more of a bruiser style game to me. Especially with the relatively small guard meter. It’s about getting down and dirty with your opponent (although VC’s changed that to some extent). It’s not meant to be as ‘clean-cut’ as a game like 3rd Strike. Although Yun and Makoto are examples of characters who can play like that.
Apoc’s A-'Rog is a good example of what I’d call successful bruiser style fighting.
I don’t understand your point about crouch cancels being unfair when they: 1) enabled some of the weaker characters to be more competitive (Cody, Sagat, Blanka, Birdie), and 2) allowed for more of the cast to stand a chance against the top tier, generally speaking.
Also, it’s “years”, not “hours”. Crouch cancels combos, infinites, and strategies which had been formulated over several years, opened up a new way of playing A3, and added a extra important element to the game. Upper’s removal of this technique can be seen as a retrograde step, where years of development suddenly had to be abandoned for the sake of Capcom’s balancing (which usually means, rather than attempting to adjust said issue, they remove it completely).
I wouldn’t really classify Sagat as weak. He’s one of the most well rounded characters in the game, even without his inf’ or corner reset. Dude isn’t right below the top 4 for no reason.
All the rest of those characters have at least one glaring flaw.
You mean Apoc?
Anyway though, yeah i think Upper wouldve been alot better if CCs were tweaked rather than removed. Meaning just remove the infinites plz.
I place him in the top tier solely because of his VC-> infinite. Perhaps it was a poor choice of description. Top of the mid-tier would have probably been more accurate. Outside of that, he has nothing particularly outstanding like the rest of the top tier. But because the VC is so important, it boosts him significantly in the rankings. Without the infinite, he becomes another one of those characters who is unable to VC unless the opponent has no meter (for fear of an un-blockable VC ; a rush-down campaign, or guard cruch VC) or when Sagat does VC, it wins the round. It’s also worth keeping in mind that, unlike the top three in A3, who’ve remained in those positions for years, Sagat’s placement was only changed within the last 3 years or so (when the Neko set-up first came about).
Yeah, I meant Apoc. Had Watson’s ST 'Rog on my mind for some reason.
I’m not denying that VC’s are part of what boosted Sagat’s status, but putting him into the same category as people like Birdie and Blanka just didn’t seem right.
I still wouldn’t ever classify him as a ‘weaker’ character. He’d just be upper mid’ like you said, instead of near top like he is now.
Cody doesn’t struggle as much as the other two, but he has a lot of fucked up match-ups.
I think Cody benefited the most with the founding of CC inf.
Without that, he’d just be rushed the fuck down, even in match ups he has a number of options in.
Now you have to sort of take a big step back cause of respecting the VC.
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Yeah, I agree that crouch cancelling shouldn’t be completely removed. But as I said before, it wasn’t! I know for certain that the Dreamcast and PSX ports of the game definitely had crouch cancels, so technically this shouldn’t have had any effect on people’s gameplay techniques.
Why then was the game abandoned? Because there were other changes (like Dhalsim getting nerfed, Chun Li’s crouching HK, decreased VC invincibility time etc.) that people just couldn’t tolerate. They were used to the game, and just couldn’t tolerate change. We should have appreciated that Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper was the way Capcom wanted the game to be played at that time. We as gamers should have embraced it, instead of being cowards and sticking to what we felt familiar and comfortable with.
You’re saying that like it’s fact. You can’t speak for the rest of the fighting game community.
Yeah, that’s true.
We’re talking about Upper and not the PSX, Saturn, or DC versions. They are not the same.
What I don’t appreciate, is Capcom’s often uninformed and lazy decisions when it comes to updating a game. They’ve also had a history of an eliminate over alleviate policy, which is usually at odds with high level players.
The removal of crouch cancelling was a retrograde step; it erased a significant aspect of A3 that was and is still developing, which benifitted all characters, though some moreso than others, and helped boost a fair amount of the weaker characters. From that standpoint, Upper is inferior because it returns A3 back to the time when CCs and infinites weren’t known. In other words, we’ve already been here and have moved on, so why take a step backwards when it’s more enjoyable here (A3) and there’s still more to discover/learn (see: the recent Sodom infinite, for example)?
So…why not give Upper a chance now?
The reason Alpha 3 died as a tourney game was because a lot of people became sick of CC, whiff throws, and V-Ism bullshit.
The PS2 AA Upper has the potential to fix all of that.
So why not give the new version of Alpha 3 a shot?
Alpha 3 was my favorite fighting game for the longest, but tourney Alpha 3 just makes me revile the game. People shouldn’t be forced to pick V-Ism in order to stand a chance.
If people wanted to give Upper a chance, they probably would’ve done that years ago.
MiddleKick made a post about why people didn’t want to play Upper.
Crouch cancels and a lot of other things added a lot of depth to the game. Upper was a step back.
Most of the new things discovered since it died in North America have to do with VC’s/CC’s anyway. Over half the cast has infinites or pseudo-infinites now, and people are alway finding more ways to transition into them or force damage resets.
The only thing I liked about Upper was the new characters and the Dhalsim nerf. I would’ve loved to have used V-Hawk.