When you’re sitting in a room with Seth Killian (Capcom Community Manager and Evolution Championship Series veteran), Derek Neal (Producer for Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition and EVO veteran) and IGN’s Fighting Master Mark Ryan Sallee (yeah, he went to EVO too), and they start talking about SF3 tournament players, it can get hard to really follow the conversation. Unlike Sallee, I’m the casual SF3 player in the office — a guy who appreciates the game’s amazing 2D visuals and smooth animation, but lacks the tournament chops needed to play on the same level as these experts.
Despite our differences in skill, it’s hard to not recognize Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition (SF3: 3SOE) as a revival effort for the last great fighting game from a bygone era. It’s a piece of history from back when television aspect ratios were still 4:3, and no one had ever heard of high definition video games. The arcade scene in the U.S. at the time seemed to be dead, but Street Fighter III still stood as a landmark of that period thanks to an unprecedented effort by Capcom to outdo anything seen in a fighting game before. Just look at Elena’s idle animation alone and you’ll gain a genuine appreciation for the amount of love crammed into the SF3 series of games.
