Sirlin.net: "The Anti-Progress Attitude"

Classic Fighting Games Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
121

Don’t know why I’m responding to this condescending argument.

By saying this, he directly “goes there” with a backhanded remark that he then tries to pretend didn’t happen. Some of us like the lack of projectiles and zoning, and like hit-confirming into super. It’s not a problem if tons of fighting game vets love to play the game. It’s only a problem because it’s not exactly like Super Turbo, the Best Fighting Game of All Time ™. (You’ll notice this is a trend in anything Sirlin writes)

The rest of his argument is dumb. Not many people enjoy losing to Chun in a 7-3 matchup… even 3s purists. The point is to faithfully recreate the game we’ve all been playing and hasn’t been touched in 12 years. Changing it now is only going to divide the small community this whole project was trying to reach in the first place. Capcom got their priorities RIGHT with this game. Nobody pretends the game is perfect, but we all know the game is 3rd Strike, with its negatives and positives brought over untouched, and all our 12 years of practice not going to waste. We have enough new fighting games coming out these days that if we wanted to play a new game, we would. We’re not buying 3rd Strike to play a new game.

If 3rd Strike was to be balanced, the time was 9 years ago, not today. It’s now a part of fighting game history and when you want to play 3rd Strike, there’s only one version of the game to play. Make a rebalance and call it something different, if you must… but don’t mess with the original.

And, of course, the last paragraph is reserved for Sirlin to advertise his own games while subtly insulting other game designers for not being as awesome as he is. It’s hard to find a Sirlin post that doesn’t contain this. I bought the full boxed copy of Yomi and actually quite like the game, but I’m getting sick of reading this type of stuff. It’s the type of thing that was considered immature in high school, let alone for a grown adult and business professional.

This whole argument kinda reminds me of an auto-body shop retouching a vintage muscle car with a new coat of paint and shine, but leaving the engine under the hood untouched. Sirlin takes his nephew to the shop and argues with the owner: “See, that old crappy engine has an 8-2 matchup with fuel economy. When you touched it up, why didn’t you slap in a new hybrid engine?” It’s like he completely misses the point of why something old and vintage can still be entertaining, despite its flaws.

(Oh and on the way out of the shop, Sirlin shouts at the owner “make Bison better, it’ll fix everything!” and then runs away)

122

Wow.

123

The creator of Guilty Gear said that Third Strike was the best fighting game he ever played. I give more credibility to the guy who made Guilty Gear, then to the idiot who butchered Super Turbo.

124

Clearly using Chess, as well as Marvel 2 and Pool, for sarcastic effect. Whoops, major brain fart on my part about the number of pockets (DURR o_O). I’ll try to do a better job at revising my work before I turn in a first draft. Game on.

125

I like 3s just fine.

You mean 3s players and sfiv players right?
3s was far too different from st for guys like me who played sf2 religously
Alpha 2 was awesome as hell one of the best fighting games ever. Alpha 3 was good, most of the cast useable.

3s changed way too much of what made street fighter well street fighter

Calling it New Generation would have been better for most of us back then because this was not the street fighter we were used to

I mean tomo felt thay way for super and st

Different strokes for different folks.

Sf3 is not really a sf game. It is a good game. Some changes could be made

But like the st nazis, any change is bad.

Lol at me getting hit confirmed into ken’s sa3 twice in the same round

Then lol at me parrying on accident with alex and winning

126

I love Third Strike, but I can see how unbalanced the game is - especially considering the only characters I find fun to play are middle to low tier characters.
But hey, at least I have FUN with Third Strike, even if it is unbalanced as hell. Still haven’t found a character that’s fun to play in SF4.

Even as a lover of Third Strike, I was agreeing with a good bit of what Sirlin was saying (until he started plugging his own games): There is this pretty bad attitude of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it - and if it is broke, don’t fix it!” No game ever gets it right the first time… or the second time, or the third. It takes years to iron out all the kinks. If a company were to rebalance a game every year or twice every year (based on extensive study of tournament results, not the laments of salty scrubs who refuse to learn), I believe we should embrace it but I know that we won’t.

The only problem is, I feel like we’ll never even have the opportunity to accept or reject such an idea because the company will be working on the next package they can sell us for $40-60… which will throw new characters into the equation which won’t have the extensive testing that the rest of the cast had.

But hey, whatever. I’ll still buy Third Strike. I can’t resist getting my ass cut playing as Elena (or Dudley when I’m serious).

127

If they ever made a new version of SFIII, it should have a 3D gfx engine and be called Street Fighter 5!

128

Dont like random Chun/Yun/Ken walking back and forth pokes into hit confirm super?

Capcom addressed this problem way back in Dreamcast; System Direction.

EVERYBODY becomes viable.

129

It should have side step too dudez!

130

Ugh, keep parrying dead, please.

131

why this has been ignored is beyond me. The system port was already not considered equal to the arcade so i felt the community should have just abandoned trying to mimic arcade setting and explore the possibilities of the console. (oh well i had fun with it)

132

If it wasn’t for choking up I would have had Ibuki in the top 8 @ Evo 2k8. 9th place instead. Oh wellz.

The Japanese have even lately put Ibuki at less of a bad matchup against Chun with the last list I saw had her only losing 4-6 instead of 3-7. Plus matchups don’t really work the same way in 3S because there’s a lot more to account for depending how people are adapting to each other’s anti parry strategies and what not. David Sirlin can say all that fun stuff and make it sound like everyone loses 8-2 to Yun and Chun (which most of the characters used in the top 10 don’t) but that’s not really what’s going on. Especially when characters like Yang, Urien and Akuma can easily take them up by a good player.

If rebalance really was the way to make 3S so much better of a game HD Remix wouldn’t have flopped and got shunned by the community after like a year. It does make more sense to balance a game where every matchup is so rigid and set in stone like ST. Which EVEN THEN the big ST fans didn’t really seem to care and their back and forth about the changes just really convoluted the community to a point where people just went back to ST.

You can apply that to any fighting game really. In ST you got beasts like Komoda Blanka tearing up at X Mania with Blanka who has plenty of uphill matches. He’s basically putting himself through what Sirlin is all up in arms about everyday in a game that’s arguably more balanced.

A game isn’t so balanced anymore if you’re playing a character like Blanka in ST. Yet…just like what I feel with 3S what makes Komoda so fun to watch is that he understands his matchups and the game to such a level that he can perform even against the odds. I feel the odds are what shaped Komoda into what he is. Not balancing the game for him. Especially when Blanka still has a lot of cheap tools that can kill you quickly off good reads.

What made the old games in general so good for me is that they never really went too hard with nerfing anything. They made sure hit boxes were strong, they made sure throws could still break up blocking well, block strings were tight, stuff like that. SFIV waters down all of that stuff and then artificially waters down hit boxes for all the characters so you have to constantly over compensate for spacing on normals that don’t have hit boxes as big as the characters and all of this other stuff. Everything is made from the ground up to never be too good and you just get a wash out of a ton of characters that never bring anything scary to the table no matter how good you get with them. Plus a lot of the cast just doesn’t have access to getting any big rewards for making good reads. Which is partly due to things like dizzies causing heavy damage scaling and the heavy scaling of the damage in general.

With 3S it’s more so the idea that Yun and Chun are just unfairly strong in a game of characters that still have really strong and almost unfair shit themselves that would blow up any of the characters in SFIV. Who the hell in SFIV has anything as good as charge partition tackles, unblockables or 100 percent stuns off extremely fast command grabs? Like the way Ibuki is totally gimped in hit boxes, walk speed and frames compared to 3S just shows an indication that they knew how strong she was even if she’s only mid tier in her own game. They also changed her from a character reliant on strong footsies, frame traps and mix ups to a character that’s pretty much entirely reliant on frame traps and mix ups that are easire to escape than Akuma’s (his footsies/walk speed also completely better). She doesn’t have the walk speed or normals to scare anybody and is mostly reliant on landing random movements that lead to untechable knockdowns. Which is hardly a solid gameplan.

133

i’m cool with a rebalanced 3s as long as it gets a name like

DJ CAP vs DJ YOMI - Third Strike (Sirlin Layer 5 Mix)

134

The only way they can justify repeated updates is adding new content. If you want purely balance updates for a lengthy period of time after release you should be prepared to pay a subscription fee.

135

3S @ EVO seems to hold a lot of weight with some people. Sirlin just hates 3S and wants to advertise his games, get over it guys.

136

I always thought this too. I was hoping they’d do a rebalanced version AND have the original. Similar to SF HD Remix.

137

He can try to balance games, but he can never balance my Yomi.

138

I’d be okay with this.

139

only if you only buff the rest of the cast and not nerf the top tiers.

as for sirlin: as long as he stays away from MvC2 i’ll keep ignoring him, like everyone else should :coffee:

140

In my opinion, no fighting game should have 5-5 for every match, that would be too boring. But if a fighting game has more than a few 8-2 matches it makes the challenge too great for the disadvantaged character (Honda vs Zangief in ST). There should be some challenging matches but not too many, and definitely not boring with all-equal matches either. There’s a fine line to balance.

For example, Super Turbo is under the mark by just a little bit. It’s got quite a few 8-2 matches, but overall the top tier is very diverse, and most importantly, it has** low tier characters that can counter the top tier** (eg Cammy counters Dhalsim, Zangief counters Balrog, Bison counters Vega, etc). This is what makes ST balanced IMO. The only problem is Honda, he owns too many low tier characters and gets owned only by fireball characters. If Honda was the only character to have been rebalanced, that would have improved the balance more than tweaking any other character IMO.

I definitely agree that 3S should have been rebalanced, either in a sequel or in its present form. Even a small tweak to Chun or Yun would have been a good thing. At the same time, I’m glad the 3S community got an arcade-perfect port.