Street Fighter II was released in 1991 (1992 for the SNES), and set arcade fighters on the path of glory, forever. And they’re still making Street Fighter II games. 40 years from now we’ll see old men in the park playing Street Fighter II: New Hologram Turbo Remix III, and that’s great, but in 1995, Capcom made a spinoff.

Part I: The History

The spinoff was called Street Fighter Zero, but here in North America we call it Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors’ Dreams. While staying true to the original playstyle, Alpha delicately added a super combo system, new characters, smoothed out the graphics, making it look a little more anime, and set the game in the past. This is the genesis of my favourite series of fighting games, and maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that, but mostly this is a review of Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max.

It’s important to understand where this game is coming from. Street Fighter III, released in 1997, had taken the series in a new direction, with new characters and a heavily augmented combat system that stood apart from the simple, chess-like elegance of Street Fighter II. One year later, Street Fighter Alpha 3 was released in arcades, and the old gang was back again.

Alpha 3 was ported to the Playstation and Saturn, and the Saturn version was probably superior. Nevertheless, the Playstation version was polished up and ported to the Dreamcast. Then a retooled, Japan-only arcade version based on the Dreamcast version of Alpha 3 (Zero 3 Upper) was released and ported to the GBA and the PSP. The GBA port lost a lot of music and stages in the compression, but the PSP port, which is really the game we’re talking about, here, was almost completely faithful. All music, and every character, is present. They even threw in Ingrid from Capcom Fighting Evolution, and a new shiny tag-team mode.

Part II: Alpha 3 Max

This review is way late. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max (or Street Fighter Zero 3 Double Upper) came out two years ago for the PSP, and you either played it or you didn’t, so let’s call this a retrospective. There are a few things to talk about. The controls are a big one. Let’s end with that one.

The PSP is capable of displaying the full resolution of this game, 384×224 pixels. The PSP must be upscaling that to 466×272, but the thing looks as clear as the sky, as sharp as a swordfish. There’s an option to stretch it to the full 480 pixels, but the graphics break a little bit. On the other hand, you don’t have the weird ugly border on either side. They call it the “wallpaper,” and you must immediately set it to black. The stages are vibrant and detailed, as are the sprites. It runs at a stupidly high frame rate, and the animations are smooth as silk–it doesn’t have III’s weird issue where some characters are animated like they’re from a completely different game.

This is a series of games that plays with subtle changes. The combat is still partitioned by the -ism system, they just added to it. And while I had ten years to get used to the soundtrack, I maybe just don’t appreciate the generic boom tika’ cha-cha, boom tika’ cha techno that you quickly forget you’re hearing. It’s not bad, it’s just not good compared to the Street Fighter soundtracks that came before it. I might be alone, there, because while I may not like the soundtrack, it is complete, and the quality (hearing-wise) is high. Apparently this game came with a new d-pad (if you pre-ordered it) to put over top of the original PSP’s d-pad. This is where all reviewers had a lot of frustration. So we’ll talk about controls, now.

The menu is a mess. There are a bajillion things to do; there’s ad-hock multiplayer, vs. cpu, two vs. one, one vs. two, boss fights only, tag battle, kill-as-many-as-you-can, the arcade mode, a world tour mode, where you choose one character and put him/her through a quasi-arcade mode to soup him/her up with special abilities (very RPG-like), a practice mode (which is appreciated), and a survival mode, which you can basically apply any of the previous modes to. It’s ridiculous. Did I mention a tag battle mode? That’s exclusive to the PSP. They figured one more couldn’t hurt, I guess. Jesus.

The pre-order d-pad fixed a lot of problems, it seems. Most reviews of this game talk about how it would be the second coming, if only you had the capcom d-pad! As best as I can discern, the original PSP had a totally crap d-pad for fighting games. I wouldn’t know, I sold my PSP for a DS during the Sony drought of 06/07. When I picked up this game and played it on the PSP 2000, I was surprised to find the controls totally serviceable. No third-party d-pad, no sock over your thumb, no nothing. Are the d-pads that different? All thumbs are certainly different, so who really knows! But I’ve played this game for hours, and I’ll tell you, my thumb hurts more after an hour on the ipod than it does with Street Fighter. It does get a little tricky to control at the highest speeds, but if you’re playing at that level, why are you reading this? Why aren’t you in a Japanese arcade, playing money?