Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike

"Best Fighting Game Evah!!!"

Street Fighter is quite possibly the greatest fighting game franchise ever, only equaled by Fatal Fury, King Of Fighters, & Samurai Shodown in my eyes. I'll readily admit to being turned off the first time I played Street Fighter III, and while SFIII: Double Impact was an improvement, it still wasn't up to par. Then along came SFIII:TS, and all was right in the SF universe once again. Everything about this game is great, the fluidity of the controls, the amazing graphics, the majority of the characters are interesting, and it has possibly the greatest boss ever, this is the closest you'll ever come to a perfect fighting game!

GRAPHICS: 10
Two words can describe the graphics, smooth & fluid. This is the most beautiful SF has ever looked, every character is extremely detailed, the backgrounds are astonishing, and the art is just astoundingly great.

SOUND AND MUSIC: 8
Some stages, like Yang's/Hugo's/Chun-Li's/Gill's, have really good music that further brings you into the fight. However, certain stages, like Ken's/Alex's/Sean's/Oro's/Elena's, have really annoying music. The music on those stages is alright at first, but the more you hear it the more annoying it gets. Still, overall the music in this game is a plus.

CHARACTERS: 9
The only reason the characters don't get a 10 are because a few of the characters, like Alex, are pretty lame, and I would have liked for their to be at least one or two more old school characters, like Sagat or Cammy. However, the characters that are in the game are very diverse, they range from the idiotic, and I don't mean that in a bad way, ie; Necro & Hugo, to the downright brilliant in Gill, Oro, and Q.

STORY: 8
The story isn't the greatest, but for what it is it's pretty good. Besides having a cool design and being a damn good character it was Gill's outright interesting story that made me like him in the first place. That goes for a lot of guys in this game, I felt that overall, at least in SFIII:DI & SFIII:TS, that the SFIII series delivered the best, most concise story, with the possible exception of the Street Fighter Alpha 3 story.

GAMEPLAY: 10
The gameplay in SFIII:TS is some of the best I've ever experienced in a fighting game. The exquisite parry system almost eliminates button mashers and makes just about every match-up into more of a contest of who is the smarter fighter instead of who has the more powerful moves.

DIFFICULTY: 10
One of the toughest fighters ever, with every round the difficulty increases, and then when you finally get to Gill it's common practice to be slaughtered until you finally master the fighting system, and even then he's still extremely hard to beat.

REPLAY VALUE: 10
This game can be played over and over again, you always want to do that much better, or discover come new little thing about the game that you didn't notice the first time.

Final Flash
Get this game, now! If you're a fan of the SF universe then this game is a must have, hell, if you're a fan of fighting games at all then this is the one fighting game that you have to own, it's that damn good!

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 10/21/04