Third Strike suddenly made sense to the world.
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Japan's Umehara provided just that in the Evolution 2004 loser's bracket final, where he executed a full parry of Chun Li's Houyokusen Super Art, batting away 14 consecutive parry strikes, followed up by a Super Art of his own to take the round. Somebody like Daigo Umehara.ĭespite its simplicity, the parry mechanic needed a defining Rocky-esque moment to show the world what it really meant to the fighting game genre.
The designers hard-coded invincibility into the game, albeit only for somebody with the reaction times of a god. It is theoretically possible to parry every single hit in a game of Third Strike. Every attack from every character, including the multi hit 'Super Arts', can be parried by a player with expert timing. The temptation must have been there for to include moves which could not be parried. By contrast, there is no penalty to a successful parry. The parry is different to a block in that, when blocking, your character sustains chip damage. Press forward on the joystick at the exact moment of any opponent's hit and your character will bat it away with the back of their hand. Street Fighter III's evolutionary change to the Street Fighter template is disarmingly simple. When playing online, the game displays whether you are playing with open or closed NAT as well as displaying your ping rate. While the game looked like orthodox Street Fighter - albeit with a more diverse cast - some twist in the DNA set it apart in competitive play. There was something at the heart of this game that was building a community and then sustaining it. Each year more and more players registered their interest to compete at Third Strike at fighting game tournaments around the globe. Nevertheless, it was a blow with repercussions. Sales of the subsequent Dreamcast release were modest. Critics awarded the game lacklustre praise. So while Third Strike's development team believed they had perfected the 2D fighter with this game, what should have landed as a sucker-punch provided just a glancing blow. Indeed, following Third Strike's release, it would be nearly a decade before we saw another mainline entry to the series. By 1999 ennui had set in, not only amongst the general gaming public, but also within the core fighting fan base. The previous decade had seen Capcom flood the market with Street Fighter-themed product in attempt after attempt to, at best, recapture Street Fighter II's heyday, or at worst, work the series' icons like wizened salesmen. While Third Strike was a game that refined all that had gone before, thanks to the state of the 2D fighting genre at the turn of the millennium, few were really paying attention. And they know that three strikes and you're out.
But for the design team on the frontline it's a stepladder towards perfection, each iteration amplifying the successes of the preceding game and diminishing its shortfalls. Perhaps, for the shareholders, this is true. Many disgruntled consumers consider Capcom's tradition of releasing three revisions to each of its prizefighters little more than a money-grabbing exercise. It was, as the name suggests, the third iteration of Street Fighter III. When Capcom pushed Third Strike into arcades in 1999, every member of its development team believed that this was the final, flawless evolution of Street Fighter.