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Review : Street Fighter Alpha 3 for Gameboy Advance
The day that I got my GBA SP I had to get a new game so I picked up Street Fighter Alpha 3 for GBA. Wow is this cart fun to play!
The original game was first made in late 1998 and is a true Capcom classic. But this version was adapted to the GBA by Crawfish Interactive in the UK.
The animation is really amazing. It took a lot of reworking the original Capcom art and the memory management and compression is nothing short of brilliant. It is at a lower resolution but almost no frame loss. Really shines on a cartridge and the animation is fluid and fast with no loading that I got used to on the CD based home consoles. Not all the background are in it but it is acceptable and the ones that are in the game look tight. It has 90% the animation and art and 100% the gameplay. Not bad considering the GBA has a quarter of a Meg of RAM.
The sound effects are bang on and the music has been sampled down for the simpler hardware but it is defiantly the same tunes.
All the Street Fighter 2 and and Street Fighter Alpha fighters and plus some from SF3 and other Capcom fighting games. Namely Naki, Eagle and Yun. The really should have changed the name of the game to show off the extra stuff.
At first it is a lot harder than the console version until you get used to the button layout on the GBA. And would more buttons on the GBA kill you Nintendo?
You need two copies of the game to do two player due to the data streaming off the cart durring a fight but it has dramatic battle mode that was only possible on the Saturn and Dreamcast.
One of my only gripes is that it does not use the same button layout as Super Street Fighter 2 Revival and it would have been good to keep it consistent. Also the game is in a simple control mode to begin and it took me a while to figure out why I could not do the super moves the traditonal way.
The price is a little steep at $30 when you can get the game new on the PSOne for $15 to $20. There is also a good PSOne version of the game if you want to see it in it's full glory Also Dreamcast and Import Saturn.
This one raises the bar for fighting games on the GBA and I am very optimistic about the future of 2d fighting games on the handheld gaming platforms. It still is one of the damn best fighting games ever and this one of the best GameBoy Advance games ever.
Jake at March 27, 2003 
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