In anticipation of Halo 3, I thought it might be a hoot to look back on other highly anticipated gaming 3's from the past, and the effect they had on that paticular game series and the world of gaming in general. Yesterday we looked at Mega Man 3 a better than average game that sadly was far worse than it's prequels before it. Next up, it's Mega Man 3's polar opposite in the annals of sequaldom, Street Fighter 3.

Yesterday I tried to drive it home that the anticipation and expectation for Mega Man 3 was HUGE. I don't think I tried hard enough. I didn't mention how back then, Mega Man 2 did have some of the best graphics possible on a home console, how there were no 3D graphics in gaming AT ALL, how Mega Man was one of the most popular characters in two of the most well crafted games of it's timePERIOD, and how Mega Man 3 was good enough to make some people happy, but by the admission of it's own creator it was PHONED IN and NOT UP TO STANDARDS.


Are the caps and italics working for you? I hope so. Because I'm really trying to help you who weren't there at the time to see that historicly speaking the 3rd game in a previously great series, no matter how much it has going for it can be a huge dissappointment, and that there predicting it ahead of time. Stranger still is that those huge dissappointements can in fact be financially successful, and vice versa. A prime example of that vice versa in action is the game known as Street Fighter 3.



There probably will never be a game as hotly anticipated and lusted after as SF3. By 1997, Street Fighter 2 had spawned countless comics, an American TV show, a Japanese TV show, a theatrical animated film, a live action film, a game of that live action film, four "updates" (Championship Edition, Turbo, Super, and Super Turbo), and two prequels (Street Fighter Alpha 1 and 2). Street Fighter was an even bigger deal then than the Halos are now.



All the while, every one of Street Fighter's millions of fans were thinking "How awesome is Street Fighter 3 going to be?". It was the game everyone wanted to see, that had to live up to the hype, that could potenitally be the greatest 2D fighting game of all time.

For me, when the game finally came, it actually lived up to the hype.


We'll start with the graphics, which as the scan below clearly shows are "Super Fine", which in normal person talk means that the animation of 2D Disney quality. Where Ryu's "hadoken" had before taken place over the course of four frames of animation in SF2 and five in SFA, in SF3 it happened in FOURTEEN FRICKIN FRAMES. This sort of silky smooth animation along with the increased detail in both the character and background sprites made SF3 the most stunningly beautiful 2D game of it's day, a title some would say the game still holds even compared to the modern Guilty Gear and Metal Slug games.



Capcom had to create a whole new arcade board just to run SF3, a board built on CD-ROMS (again, a big deal at the time) called the the CPS-III. Extremely expensive, but thought to be well worth the cost considering how SF3 was sure to blow the compation out of the water and turn huge profits (think PS3).

And not only did the hard working 2D geniuses of Capcom R&D create some of the most beautiful graphics the world had ever seen, they also went the extra mile and created 8 all new playable characters for the game. Gone were all the Street Fighter 2 stand bys we'd played with again and again and again. Here were all new characters with totally new play styles and techniques to master. The world had grown accustomed to all 2D fighting games having the same players, the big slow grappler vunerable to projectiles (Zangief), the fast but weak girl with only a few special moves (Chun-Li) the all arounders whose fireball/uppercut pattern was enough to kill any begginer (Ken and Ryu) the guy with telaports, strechy limbs, or other cheats (Dhalsim), the human projectile (E. Honda and Blanka) all character paradimes that had become par for course on every SF2 spin-off, sequal and rip-off.

SF3 changed all that.



The main grappler in that game (Alex) was fast and leathal, custom built to kill anyone dumb enough to toss a fireball his way. There were two girls, one with a million moves and Dhalsim level cheats (Ibuki), and one with almost a Dhalsim level of reach, and a move that actually heals her until her life comes back! This level of cheapness had never before been seen in a game, and was sure to blow the mind of all comers.



There was a black British boxer, a one armed old man, and two skate boarding chinese teenagers, a Brazilian Ken wanna-be, a russian experiment who some how combined the freakyness of both Dhalsim and Blanka, the list goes on.

If you wanted a 2D fighter that felt truly new, you couldn't ask for more than what SF3 gave you. Just take a cloce look at the top of this double page scan. look at the detail in the animation. Ten years later, and I still can't believe the time and effort that went into this game.



And yet, it totally failed.

Why?

Some would say that the 2D fighter had already run it's course by that time, that Tekken and Virtual Fighter had taken ovr. I would disagree, as Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Street Fighter Alpha 3 were still to come, and both would serve to be much more successful than the SF3 series.

I think that three things killed SF3. One was the price of the board. If an arcade owner had to choose between buying a CPS-III game board like SF3 or a CPS-II board like SFA or X-Men Vs Street Fighter, there was really no question which was the safer bet. CPS-III boards cost up to five times what CPS-II's did. That wouldn't have been such a deterant if it weren't for my second point.

Capcom beat itself at it's own game.

They had done too good of a job with the DarkStalkers, Street Fighter Alpha, and Marvel 2D fighters. Kids in arcades only had so much money, they had to spend their quarters wisely. And many of them were already hooked on using reliable characters they could win with, characters they could use in SFA, Darkstalkers, or the Marvel games. SF3 lacked these characters, It was too initmidating, too new.

And worst of all, SF3 was too graphicly advanced to be ported to home consoles like the PS1 and the Saturn. Kids could not practice at home then take their skills to the arcade as they had done with every SF game since SF2 on the SNES. With out that additional practice, they would quickly lose in what ever matches they braved in SF3. Angry and sad, they'd whimper back over to SFA or a Marvel game and spend there quarters there, on a game they were actually good at.

In these ways, SF3 was literally too good for it's own good.

Bringing it back to Halo 3, I'm pretty sure Bungie wont suffer the same fate with it's highly anticipated 3. Modern gaming doesn't exist in the arcade/console world that it did in 1997. And from what I've played of the beta, there is absolutely nothing about Halo 3 that wont make fans of the other 2 games feel right at home.

One similarity between the challanges of SF3 and Halo 3 is the compation that each of their own successes created. Like with Halo 1, SF2 was a pioneer in it's genre. Before SF2 there were no complex VS fighters. After SF2's success, tons of spin-offs and rip-offs popped up, including World Heroes, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Samurai Showdown, the above mentioned DarkStalkes and Marvel games, CyberBots, Waku Waku 7, Killer Instinct, Tekken, Virtual Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and countless others. This obviously made the field much more crowded and difficult to dominate. The same is true of the Halo series. The 360 now has counltess online battle games, from Gears to Bomberman. Will Halo 3 be able to stand out in the modern world as easily as Halo 1 did years ago?

And most of all, will Halo 3 fail to live up to the hype as SF3 did? I think that hype is more dangerous to Halo 3 than anything else. Like many have said, Halo 3's release has more in common with a blockbuster movie's than a game's. And I cannot think of a blockbuster film's third installment that has lived up to fan expectation. Spider Man 3, Pirates 3, Matrix 3, Star Wars 3, Star Wars prequels 3, all more or less failed in the eyes of many fans.

It was the same with SF3. It's release wasn't like any other game that had come before it. People expected it to change their lives. When it turned out to be just another 2D fighting game in the eyes of many, it actually worked to kill both SF3 and 2D fighters in general. There is a reason SF4 still hasn't been released. SF3 killed it before it was even born.

Those are my thoughts. What you bitches think? Did you play the SF games as they developed?

If not, or if you just don't remember, check out the embeded vids (if they work). which game looks best to you?