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Are you ready for this deadly fight? As a Street Fighter fanatic, I can tell you that when a port of a SF title gets announced for a console with less power than the game's own arcade board, I get somewhat apprehensive. There's no possible way that you're gonna get a carbon copy, so I begin to wonder what's not gonna make the cut this time? The GameBoy Advance is more or less a portable SNES with a lower resolution, and with a not-so-great port of Street Fighter Zero 2 (programmed by Nintendo) already proving to be too difficult to program for SNES, how can Zero 3 be better? The folks at Crawfish Interactive, who made Street Fighter Zero for GBC, understand this dilemma, and have taken a very interesting route. The biggest handicap of all would have to be the control. A 6 button fighter made onto a 4 button (arguably 3 button...you try using the L button for an extended period...) machine with an all too small digital pad. Frightening. What they have done here is enabled the missing two buttons to be activated by pressing two of the others at the same time (ie...press jab and fierce and you get strong). Certainly a solution, but is it practical? Not really, but definately better than not having it available at all of course. The d-pad is a whole other beast. Designed for children, I find it very difficult to do special moves simply because of the size of my thumb in relation to the pad. A certain precision is required for some moves like Zangief's Spinning Pile Driver that can't be met here not to mention the more complicated Super Combos. Crawfish however has addressed the issue of Super Combos with their "Simple Combo" option. Here all the Super Combos have a dumbed-down command that can be pulled off quite easily. QCF+A+B, QCB+A+B, back to forward+A+B, and forward to back+A+B. Characters like Gouki that have up to 4 Super Combos will utilize all 4 commands, and characters that don't will simply use the amount needed in the order provided. An example would be Ryu's Shinkuu Hadoken (QCF+A+B), Shinkuu Tatsumakisempu Kyaku (QCB+A+B), and Shin Shoryuken (back to forward+A+B). The 4th command is not used because Ryu does not have a 4th Super Combo. The same is true for the rest of the cast. The only real complaint is that there isn't a dumbed-down way to perform the regular special moves as seen in Super Street Fighter II X Revival. Charge characters, prepare to damage my thumb.
Shockingly, the characters retain 90% of their animation frames, the only ones being excluded are some winning, opening as well as some special intro animations. Not a big loss at all considering that we are given full fighting frames. You simply don't know what it means to me to have the characters animate fully while in battle.
Street Fighter is a game where timing is crucial and the game would feel stiff with the choppy characters. I am so impressed with this aspect, and the way it was handled was quite interesting. The character sprites were shruken down, most likely for memory issues but you'll notice that they're aspect to the screen is also proper, and then cleaned up so that you can still make out details. Fantastic work in this department. It seems the only real casualty is Rose. Either she had too many details to begin with, or she wasn't cleaned up with the same zeel as the rest. Her lowest buckle appears and disappears during her idle animation. Understandable that all details can't be kept when taking an already low resolution sprite and making it even smaller, or was this just a lazy mistake? Either way it's really nitpicking as the characters really did come out so well. There definately had to be some cutbacks though. Fitting SFZ3 on an 8 Meg cart just isn't possible, even with the lower resolution characters. Some such cutbacks include missing backgrounds, sound effects, music, endings, animations, as well as the popular World Tour mode. The stages are few which is hardly a big deal. The ones that are present, however, are polished up nicely. You get the lightning and rain effects on Super Vega's stage, whatever parallax that's really needed and any color cycling. Without a doubt the stage that remained the closest to the original was Birdie's. A cool stage to begin with and the only animation it had was color cycling which is easily replicated, not to mention the music being so close to perfect. Wonderful job there.
In the depertment of sound effects it gets a little funny. Hitting sounds are all nice. You get your regular flavor of beefy hits as well as Balrog's claw sounds cutting or breaking off. For voices, rather than having all character voices included in low quality, we get just the important ones nice and clear. There's one set of grunts, groans and knock out screams for the male and female characters. Special move voice effects are mostly intact. The only truly strange occurance being that Dan and Sakura both use Ken's voice for special moves. Yes, that means Dan says "Hadoken" instead of "Koryuken". The game narrator is also MIA, which I'm sure some would be happy about. No more being told to "Go Foe Broke" >:b. Character endings are non-existant. Instead there is one generic ending for everyone, and there is no intro for the game. Probably the biggest drawback is the exclusion of sprite details on characters caused by using different ISM modes. The only two being Chun-Li and Sodom. Chun-Li in X-ISM mode wore her outfit in Street Fighter II, and Sodom in X-ISM mode uses Katanas (his weapon in Final Fight) instead of Dais. Both of these extra versions are not included, which is only really bad for Sodom as his range was increased by using X-ISM. Having these two "extra" costumes would mean having another whole Sodom and Chun-Li sprite set, meaning two other whole characters, which is unreasonable. For space, they were left out.
I'm making the game sound bad, which isn't the case at all, so here are the positives. Minus World Tour mode, all other modes from the console editions are included. This means Arcade, Practice, VS, Final Battle, Dramatic Battle, Original Survival, Boss Survival, and 10-infinity Survival modes are all intact. Details on the character selection screen are all the same as the original. The cursor on the world map even changes latitude and longitude numbers as it moves. The countdown before each round, as well as the large text before and after are here too. You really feel it's truly SFZ3. Extra characters from the console versions and the arcade "Upper" version like Fei-Long, Dee Jay, T.Hawk, and Guile are all present. But perhaps the biggest draw to the SF crowd would be the inclusion of Maki, Yun, and Eagle from Capcom VS SNK 2. By finishing Arcade mode several times, you'll slowly unlock all the hidden characters incluing these three. Sure, Yun has no business being in this game, story-wise, but since this version has no story and all the work on him was already done in CvsS2, he's certainly a welcome addition. The 3 each have new art for their 2 character portraits done by Capcom's artist for Zero3 and are an excellent bunch that really peak my interest in the game all over again. And although the World Tour mode was excluded, Crawfish has made all of the "Plus ISM's" you earn from that mode unlockable here. An excellent port of one of the best Street Fighters.
A final tidbit. Because the japanese character set takes up more memory than an english character set, CrawFish has said that the US version will include two more of the missing stages. A nice extra, and goes to show that they really care.
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