Virtual On Review

Virtual On is a game that can't make up its mind. On one hand it's a fighting game where players pick from a collection of robots, each with its strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, Virtua On is a tank-inspired shooter, meant to be played with dual sticks. And while it shone brightly in the arcades, on the Saturn it merely gives off a dull glint. But don't blame the Saturn for this - blame the game.

The game is simple and to the point. Two robots enter an arena. They stare each other down. Then they jump, fly, run, and shoot each other until one of them finally explodes. Each robot has three different attacks that power-up when fired while the robot is running or flying. Each 'bot wields two standard-fare weapons that include run-of-the-mill homing lasers, bombs, or shotguns. Each robot also possesses a third, special offensive weapon that is a little more spectacular (they consist of sword attacks and huge dual lasers, among other things).

Virtual On's polygon graphics look sharp, but on the Saturn the game doesn't feel nearly as smooth as it did in the arcade, especially in the split-screen two-player mode. The standard control is tolerable, but the twin stick (available direct from Sega) is much better and more intuitive. The music isn't anything special, and the sound effects are pretty standard. The game also features a very annoying alarm that sounds when your robot is nearly out of power.

The play in Virtual On is fairly basic. All a player needs to do to beat the computer is dash back and forth, firing off a homing weapon. This tactic works all the way up to the last boss, who as it turns out, is a nearly unstoppable mass of metal.

In the end, Virtual On is a mindless chunk of fun. There isn't much to it, but it's the type of game that can be picked up and put down at the drop of a dime. Have five minutes to spare? Play a round or two of Virtual On, then move on with your life. Maybe that's why it did so well in the arcades; one could blow up a couple of robots, and then go play a real game.

Virtua Fighter PC Review

When I first got word that Sega Entertainment was about to release Virtua Fighter on the PC, I must admit that I greeted the news with skepticism. With very few exceptions, console games rarely survive the conversion to the PC with their graphics, control, and playability intact. Surprisingly, however, Sega has managed to overcome most of these traditional obstacles, and has delivered a solid beat-'em-up in the process.

For those unfamiliar with the game, Virtua Fighter pioneered the concept of 3-D fighters when it was unveiled to a stunned arcade audience in 1993. The revolutionary game engine took the complex polygon engine of a flight simulator and placed it into a Mortal Kombat-style fighter. While the gameplay remained basically the same as that of its two-dimensional predecessors (pummel the other person until he is rendered unconscious), the three-dimensional environment delivered a degree of realism that the two-dimensional titles could not hope to match. The result was that Virtua Fighter has become one of the most successful arcade games of all time.

Since the heart of Virtua Fighter resides in realistic motion - rather than realism - the AM2 Design team captured the moves of actual martial arts experts as they executed more than 700 attacks. These moves are accessed by performing combos or multiple sequential hits to the three action buttons - block, punch, and kick. For example, to perform Pai's whirlwind kick, hit punch, punch, and kick in a rapid sequence. This may seem a bit awkward at first, but after a few hours it becomes second nature. A secondary benefit of this system is that it overcomes the PC's hardware constraint, which allows a maximum of four buttons on any joystick port. Unfortunately, the use of three buttons on the first controller forces a second player to use the keyboard for head-to-head play. While you cannot blame Sega for the hardware limitation, the harsh reality is that the player with the joypad always wins, and the player with the keyboard always loses. This reduces the best feature of the arcade game to a simple contest of who can say “dibs” the quickest.

While the graphics fall short of the beautiful Saturn version, they still command respect. Players can choose the “classic” untextured polygons of the arcade model, or the more realistic “remix” version developed for the Saturn. Regardless of which version you prefer, the graphics remain crisp and the colors vibrant (without the “washed out” look that typically plagues console ports).

In conclusion, Virtua Fighter is unquestionably the best 3-D fighter published to date on the PC. While not as fast or graphically appealing as the Saturn version, this is as close as a standard PC is likely to come. If you have even a passing interest in 3-D fighters, Virtua Fighter PC is not to be missed.

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects Review

On paper, Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects, Electronic Arts' new fighting game, has all the ingredients usually found in a wild success. If you're looking for star power, Marvel Nemesis's solid selection of beloved comic book superheroes and brand-new metahumans fits the bill; Marvel's characters use all of their classic mutant attacks and techniques, and the rookie Imperfects hold their own, too. These guys can fly all over the screen, swing on webs, and throw cars at one another, just like in the comics. Plus, all of the action takes place in various fully destructible environments, and the whole package is supported by a pretty robust online infrastructure (except in the GameCube version of the game). Unfortunately, these parts, as promising as they are, do not form a particularly appealing whole. Marvel Nemesis has been engineered in such a way that you must slog through the game's weakest parts to gain access to its best features--and you'll have to wrestle with some serious balance and gameplay issues along the way.

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects's story makes about as much sense as you'd expect from a beat-'em-up built from decades of pulpy pop-culture clich?s. Niles Van Roekel, a sinister bald fellow in a lab coat, has somehow precipitated an alien invasion of New York City. Over the course of several ugly in-engine cutscenes, you'll learn that Van Roekel himself is an alien, and he's hell-bent on developing an army of super powered goons to counterinvade another planet. Or something. In the course of his obsession, Van Roekel has failed repeatedly to generate the ultimate fighting machine--six times, to be exact. These six extremely dangerous assistants, known as the Imperfects, are Van Roekel's most powerful shock troops. In one-on-one combat, they're a match for the best superheroes (and villains!) Marvel can muster, from Spider-Man, Venom, and The Thing to Wolverine, Magneto, and Daredevil.

That's the best part of Marvel Nemesis by far: titanic battles between super powered adversaries. The problem is that the developer has buried these occasional clashes in an ocean of mediocre, homogenous, button-mashing gameplay. In order to unlock most of the game's content--which includes playable characters for use in the one-on-one mode or online combat, collectable cards, animated comic books, and several short videos--you have to get through the game's interminable single-player scenario. This consists of dozens and dozens of short levels that take place in just a handful of fighting environments, which you'll return to again...and again...and again. You may start at a different point in the arena, or have a different objective to satisfy, like blowing up power generators or throwing a certain number of enemies into a pit, but it feels like the same thing in every single case.

The game tries to dress this up as a kind of story-driven adventure by giving you a choice of up to four different characters' paths every time you beat a level. For instance, you might play through The Thing's story for a couple levels, until you best one of the other characters in a boss fight. Then, you'll have exhausted that story path for a while and you'll have to switch to another character, like Storm. Each character has both a good and evil manifestation, depending on whether they've been subjected to Van Roekel's alien mind-control technology. This is how the game rationalizes all of the bizarre match-ups it throws at you.

Sadly, there's no such excuse for the seemingly endless army of faceless alien mooks, of which there are only a few basic types, that you have to defeat on the way to a boss fight. The assorted little guys try to slash at you with blades, shoot you with blasters, or grab on to you and blow up; you can typically kill them with a single flurry on the attack button. Bigger guys can actually deflect your basic blows, counterattack, and teleport, as well as throw heavy objects at you. They take about three basic combinations to kill. Finally, there are the flying enemies, which are definitely the scourge of the single-player game. These things are very, very difficult to hit, and they can do an absurd amount of damage with their blasters.

The single-player levels are mind-numbingly simple at first, but they ramp up in difficulty quickly, although there's no consistent challenge gradient. Simply put, Marvel Nemesis's gameplay system was pretty clearly designed for one-on-one fights, and it doesn't function very well when you're confronted by multiple enemies. For example, there's no lock-on system for directing your attacks--you simply have to try to line up your character with the enemy and then launch your assault. Therefore, it can be difficult to defend against attacks from multiple directions. The camera mechanic doesn't make fighting multiple enemies any easier, because it'll zoom in and out at odd points, and many enemies will launch attacks from offscreen. The game won't tell you when this is happening, or from what direction, so you may be blindsided by a thrown car, right in the middle of punching another enemy out. The right analog stick allows you to free-look, but it's impossible to do that effectively in the middle of a brawl; mostly, you'll just have to try to keep the bad guys in front of you.

Another serious problem has to do with the game's overuse of environmental obstacles and weapons. It seems like most of the levels are saturated with things that can be picked up and thrown, and many of these things are also explosive. Whether you get beaned by a small piece of equipment or are subjected to an exploding oil drum, you'll take far more damage than you would from other types of attacks...and it's far too easy to wander into a field of explosive objects in the middle of a fistfight. Yes, it's possible to catch thrown objects and toss them back, but the fact that there's no way to refill your life gauge (except in very rare circumstances) leaves very little margin for error. The environmental combat is a neat idea, and it's well-executed in some respects, but the game leans on it too heavily.

Indeed, the single-player game's many imbalances and loose ends make it feel like a hastily sketched-out afterthought, rather than the vital component it supposedly is. For instance, if your character has a projectile attack, it may autotarget the enemy you're aiming at--or a stone column right next to it. On the other hand, if you don't have a projectile attack, it's literally next to impossible to line up an attack on the flying drones, which will pick you apart from the air; it's not unusual to be pinned in a corner and simply dispatched in a few seconds, with no chance for recourse. Finally, parts of the enemy artificial intelligence simply feel broken. If you stand at the edge of a gap, grunts on the other side will simply fall right in and die. Even the bosses don't display much in the way of street smarts; we occasionally witnessed them launch blistering attacks while facing in exactly the wrong direction. This heap of small annoyances adds up to a frustrating experience overall, no matter how skilled you may be.

All this is a shame, because the game's controls actually make a lot of sense for more casual players. As mentioned above, there's a basic attack button that'll create combos with repeated tapping, a jump, a block/dodge, and a throw. The left shoulder button controls movement powers, like Storm's flight and The Wink's teleportation, while the right shoulder button applies super powers to whatever you're doing at the time. For instance, holding down the right trigger while attacking will trigger an extrapowerful combo, while performing a power throw can initiate a brutal finishing move in one-on-one combat (sadly, you cannot skip these animations--and some of them are on the long side). Using super powers depletes your power meter, but it also fills up the rage meter, which will grant you temporarily unlimited use of super powers when full. Otherwise, the power meter recharges slowly on its own, and you can accelerate the charge by holding down the right shoulder button while stationary.

With some practice, this system can prove to be both elegant and entertaining, provided that you're fighting a duel. While playing as Spider-Man, it's a great feeling to be able stick to a wall, snag a nearby statue with some webbing, and send it hurtling towards an enemy. Each character has at least one mind-blowing maneuver like that, such as Venom's totally insane corkscrew attacks or Paragon's bomb trails. It's a little too easy to execute a finishing move, though. All you need to do is perform a massive attack on your opponent, causing them to momentarily enter a "danger" state, and then pull off a power throw while relatively close to them; you need not deplete their life meter completely, and there's no counter against it.

The PS2 and Xbox versions of the game feature a fairly robust online mode that's easily the game's most enjoyable feature. You can jump into a quick match with another player, or set various parameters for a more controlled experience. Obviously, other players won't exhibit the same behavioral quirks as some of the CPU-controlled opponents, so the fighting feels somewhat more natural, and there's no apparent lag at any point. The game keeps track of your success rate, too, and offers up very comprehensive stat tracking and leaderboards for comparative purposes. Although it still has access to offline duels against a CPU or human opponent, the GameCube version of the game lacks online multiplayer entirely, and this is a sore loss indeed.

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects has a good presentation, but it doesn't clear the bar by a very wide margin. This is a very character-focused game, so it makes sense that much of its graphical flashiness resides in the character animation, which is absolutely top-shelf. The developer seems to have taken great pains to make the characters move and fight the same way they do in the comic books, and the effort has paid off. The faster characters, like Spider-Man and Fault Zone, flit about with a fluid grace, while big guys like The Thing really look massive and can shatter the pavement with their jumps. All of the attacks, movements, and powers have a highly authentic feel to them, which is sure to please Marvel fans. At its best, this game really does look like you're playing a through a comic book.

The environments where the characters do their fighting, however, aren't nearly as fun to look at. Most of them are actually sort of bland. Most of the walls are decked out in dull, lifeless textures, and the light and shadow effects are mediocre for a console game coming out in late 2005. It seems as though the developer was going for a flat-shaded comic book look, but wasn't quite able to pull it off convincingly. Furthermore, the destructible elements in the arenas don't fall apart or blow up with a convincing degree of violence--exploding cars will produce a shock wave, for instance, but they don't send out a shower of debris, and the husk is just an ugly black polygon. The looks the best in the GameCube and Xbox versions of the game, which is able to render the lighting effects and textures with a little more subtlety; the PS2 version is pretty comparable, though. Happily, the frame rate holds steady in all three versions, even when there are many moving objects onscreen.

Marvel Nemesis's sound is pretty average for a game of its type. The sound effects are good enough to augment the onscreen violence--especially when you start zapping baddies with lighting bolts or throwing fireballs--but they're certainly not going to knock anyone's socks off. Overall, they're a pretty quotidian collection of beat-'em-up thumps, bashes, and breaking glass. The game's music is also on the forgettable side; it's standard-issue superhero stuff, with lots tense-sounding synth orchestras and keyboards. It blends into the background nicely, which is probably exactly what the developer intended. The voice acting sells the characters, each of whom get silly opening and closing lines, as well as some occasional dialog during the cutscenes. It's not award-winning work, but it's not bad, either.

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects could have been a decent beat-'em-up game that provided some great fan service, if its poor single-player scenario hadn't unhinged the entire process. This game has tons of content, great characters, and simple controls, suggesting that it was designed with more casual players and/or Marvel fans to pick up and immediately enjoy--but the ragged gameplay mechanics and balance issues that infest the one-player game will likely frustrate this very same audience to no end. If you're a patient player that's into the subject material, you'll probably get some benefit out of Marvel Nemesis, thanks to the wealth of comic book goodies and the solid online fighting. All others should approach this game with caution, because there are certainly better beat-'em-up fighters out there.

There's a lot of potential to make good games using the Naruto license. The comics and anime series are filled with elements that can transition well to games: a huge cast of ninja characters with varied motives and personalities, an interesting fantasy setting, and, of course, lots of supernaturally powered ninjutsu battles. Sadly, Ultimate Ninja Impact fails to capitalize on all the great things the Naruto universe has to offer.

Ultimate Ninja Impact adapts the storyline of the most current Naruto anime series, Naruto Shippuden. In the Ultimate Road campaign, Naruto has returned to Hidden Leaf Village after three years of intense training to be reunited with many of his friends and comrades. However, his dear companion Sasuke, who has defected to serve the insidious Orochimaru, is not among them. Naruto learns of some pressing events happening in the village and elsewhere, and he immediately sets off with his teammates to try to set things right, only to get tied up in a much bigger plot that involves several different factions. The way the game adapts the story is admirable, though if you're already familiar with the way events play out (having read the comic or watched the show), there isn't much in the way of surprises.

The main game is divided into several chapters, each of which contains a map screen that allows Naruto and company to advance to various events and stages. By completing certain stages or objectives (some mandatory, some optional), new playable characters, missions, and special ability cards can be unlocked. Successfully completing levels and performing skillfully in battle also earns you ninja points, which allows you to purchase character-enhancing card pieces and upgrades, along with extras like music or wallpaper. Each chapter has a separate completion gauge that lets you know how much further you have to go before you've found and collected everything available. There's a lot of emphasis on collecting bonus goodies in Ultimate Ninja Impact, and this element of the game is well executed. Visuals and sound are also quite nice: The character models are faithful to the original designs and are surprisingly detailed. A heavy amount of voice-over also accompanies the story in both English and Japanese audio tracks.

The actual combat, however, is considerably less exciting. Ultimate Ninja Impact borrows liberally from the design of Tecmo Koei's Warriors games, for all of the good and bad that may entail. Controls are easy to grasp: You can jump, air-dash, or guard, as well as perform basic attack combos and throw weak projectiles with simple button presses. The chakra attacks are slightly more complex; they require you to first charge up your chakra meter sufficiently by holding down the triangle button and then either execute them at the end of a basic combo string or hit a set button sequence. Some of these skills require specific timing, which the game doesn't always teach well, but for the most part, screen-clearing, mega-damaging attacks are merely a few button presses away. Filling both your chakra and awakening gauges while fighting allows your character to enter a special, temporary powered-up mode. While chakra and awakening attacks have varying properties for each playable character, the basic means of execution is the same for each fighter, which allows players to quickly adjust when the game requires you to use a different cast member. However, it also means that the number of different actions each character can perform is strictly limited. Characters can gain levels and equip stat-boosting character cards to enhance their abilities, but their combat capabilities rarely expand beyond a basic skill set.

Limited fighting capabilities would be perfectly fine if the action itself was intense and engaging. Unfortunately, this is the area in which Ultimate Ninja Impact falls flat on its face. Much like the Warriors games that seem to have inspired it, Ultimate Ninja Impact puts you in small maps to fight big packs of enemies. While mowing down a crowd of ninjas is fun at first, it quickly becomes less satisfying when you realize just how utterly stupid and ineffective most of the enemies are and how easy they are to wipe out with a basic combo. Each mission contains several objectives, most of which are simply variations of "go to this place" or "beat these enemies." You quickly find yourself repeating similar objectives for each new mission you reach, putting up with annoying background pop-in as you carelessly wipe out another platoon of generic ninjas. Every now and then, you might encounter a slightly tougher enemy, an enemy with a gimmick, or a boss. These enemies are unique in that they actually pose something of a threat and will aggressively attack you. However, they still fall quickly to basic evasion and rapid-fire damaging chakra combos. Ultimate Ninja Impact on anything but the hardest difficulty is a very easy game, and unfortunately, said hardest difficulty doesn't unlock until well into the campaign. As a result, the combat quickly turns into a boring slog that you only put up with to try to collect NPs and nifty new cards.

The game features a few additional modes as well. Tag Battle lets you team up with either a computer-controlled companion or a friend (with his or her own PSP and copy of the game) to take on specially scripted missions for NP rewards, while Extra Missions offers more challenging single-player objectives to try to complete for additional rewards. (Given the game's typically lax difficulty, these missions are only slightly more taxing than your standard story fights.) You can use your full army of unlocked characters in these fights, which makes them the main place to play and level up favorite cast members that don't get much attention in the central plot.

But when the fighting itself is lacking in excitement, it really doesn't matter how many extra modes you throw in--inherent mediocrity is rarely remedied by putting it in different dressings. Ultimate Ninja Impact doesn't try to do anything beyond offering a bog-standard action game where you fight a lot of enemies at once. As a result, it winds up being a game that is mildly entertaining for short periods of time but quite tedious in extended play sessions. In the end, Ultimate Ninja Impact simply doesn't live up to the intensity of its title.

The King of Fighters XI Review

The annual King of Fighters series is more than a decade old, and originates on arcade hardware that's older still, though the series' solid and varied gameplay has continued to bring the faithful coming back for more each year. Although many hardcore followers consider 1998's The King of Fighters '98 to be the best game in the bunch--and some feel the series has gone downhill since then--the 2D fighting series has finally returned in style with The King of Fighters XI, a fast-paced game with a huge, well-balanced character roster and a lot of gameplay depth. Even though the game originally appeared on the Atomiswave arcade platform (arcade hardware with the embarrassing distinction of having noticeable load times), the game traces its roots, and most of its art assets, back to developer SNK's NeoGeo platform, and this reliance on older graphics is hard to miss. However, if you're a bona fide 2D fighting-game fan, there's a good chance that graphics have always taken a backseat to gameplay for you, and if that's the case, you'll get all the great gameplay you can handle in this extremely well-crafted fighting game.

The King of Fighters series changed up the standard one-on-one style of most fighting games by introducing a unique team mechanic that lets you choose a group of characters to control across a series of rounds, and teams are back again in KOF XI, along with a new "shift" system. Shifting lets you call in another member of your team in the middle of a match, either to escape a severe beating or to assist in a few different ways to one you've been dishing out. The shift mechanic seems to work just fine and favors aggressive play; it's not a safe way to escape punishment (given that there's a slight delay on it), and it adds some good variety. If you're an ambitious sort who likes to string together huge combination attacks, you can use the shift mechanic for this purpose as well, though you can get through most of your matches with little to no use of it.

Regardless of what you think about the shifting system, the game's teams are quite solid because you can select from a huge, well-rounded group of characters. Most of them are old favorites from previous KOF games, and there's a few transplants from other SNK games. In addition, you can unlock several more hidden characters both by completing the single-player arcade mode, and by playing the "challenge" mode, which has a series of odd, puzzle-like requirements (such as defeating an enemy using only a certain type of attack). By default, the game offers a solid roster of 33 characters to play (divided among 11 teams of three apiece), though you can unlock 14 more characters, which brings the roster to a whopping 47 characters total. With the exception of the unlockable bosses, all of the game's characters seem balanced pretty well; just about any team of characters can take down any other team. And because there are so many characters choose from, there's a good chance you can find at least a few that you like. But you'll probably find a few that you don't care for, either, such as the extremely powerful sub-boss Shion, and the extremely unimpressive final boss, Magaki, who has an annoying voice and doesn't look terribly threatening, but is so absurdly overpowered that your final battles with him will be a chore rather than an exciting challenge.

The whisper-thin Magaki will be a bit hard for most players to look at, but depending on your experience with and expectations of fighting games, you might have some issues with the rest of the game's presentation. No, you're not going to get a game that looks as impressive in motion as a Virtua Fighter 5 or even a Soul Calibur 3. However, if you've played these types of games before, you should easily be able to look past the dated graphics and appreciate the game's artwork for what it is. This is truly a 2D fighting game with character sprites that have been retouched and tweaked countless times over the years, and they look just fine in motion. Many of the characters have plenty of personality and lots of different voice samples that play when they attack, get hit, or recover from being knocked down. The game's voice acting is all in Japanese, but it's all delivered decently well, and the menus and dialogue screens (for between-match cinematics and victory screens) are all in decently translated English. However, KOF XI's music isn't quite as impressive. Much of it is pretty generic high-energy techno and electronic stuff that's easy to forget.

The North American PS2 version of KOF XI seems to be a straightforward conversion of the original Japanese PS2 version of the game, minus support for online play. Both versions have one-on-one multiplayer, a single-player arcade mode, an alternate single-player team mode, a survival mode, a challenge mode, a practice mode, and a gallery of unlockable artwork. Likewise, the character roster is both big enough and deep enough (every character in the game has his or her own set of fighting maneuvers with special properties you'll want to experiment with) to keep you busy just playing the game in single-player mode against the game's fairly challenging computer-controlled opponents. However, like most head-to-head fighting games, KOF XI really doesn't really come into its own unless you have some good human players to take on.

KOF XI brings together some decent extras in the form of additional play modes and unlockable art galleries, a unique twist with the shift system, and a surprisingly good single-player experience. Each of these elements is a good addition, but taken together with a fighting game that offers solid, fast-paced gameplay and a huge roster of interesting and well-balanced playable characters, you get a very compelling package for any players who consider themselves to be 2D fighting-game fans.

Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Review

Street Fighter III has long been a favorite of the hardcore crowd, but it's a game that never managed to match the wild mainstream popularity of its predecessor. Deeply technical and complex, SFIII was, for the most part, underappreciated when it was first released in the late '90s, but it nonetheless found a place as a favorite amongst tournament-level players. Street Fighter III: Third Strike was the last arcade update of the game, and it now makes its way onto current-gen consoles. This Online Edition is a practically flawless port of the arcade game, bringing with it all the nuance, complexity, and sheer fun of the original, as well as its various character balance issues.

It's easy to see why Street Fighter III never reached the stratospheric heights of Street Fighter II. Street Fighter III ditched the majority of the characters that players had grown to love, replacing them with an eclectic group of newcomers who, for the most part, looked and played little like the Street Fighter II and Alpha series alumni. The game also required you to have a high level of technical proficiency to master it and introduced some mechanics and concepts that were new to the genre at the time. EX moves--supercharged versions of normal supers--were first introduced here, but SFIII's biggest gameplay innovation was the parry system, a high risk/reward mechanic that let you negate attacks by pressing forward (or down for low attacks) the instant a hit landed. The parry system completely changed the way Street Fighter played, forcing you to significantly lift your skills to stay competitive in a world where any attack could be parried for no penalty.

Because of its intricacies, the game may not immediately appeal to those used to the accessibility of newer fighting games. Street Fighter III has a steep learning curve and certainly isn't as accessible as Mortal Kombat, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, or even Street Fighter IV. Third Strike Online is a game that demands dedication, but the payoff is a tight, exciting experience that rewards skill, timing, and strategy.

Those used to Street Fighter II or IV will find III's cast tough to come to terms with initially, but spend enough time with them and it becomes clear that the roster is the most diverse in the entire Street Fighter series. Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li are the only representatives of the original World Warriors, while III introduced characters like Makoto, Dudley, Ibuki, and the Hong Kong twins Yan and Yung. The other brawlers who make up the full roster of 21 characters range from the familiar (French fighter Remy, capoeira fighter Elena, and Ken trainee Sean) to the downright strange (the one-armed Oro, the flexible Necro, and the batty Twelve), giving the game an impressive level of fighting-style diversity.

If you played Street Fighter III: Third Strike in arcades, then you'll be immediately comfortable with Online, because it captures the feel of the arcade version well. Characters, timing, and inputs all feel right, so those with proficiencies on a real-world cabinet will find their skills transferring easily. But accurately emulating the arcade experience also has its downsides, specifically with character balance. As in the arcade version, some characters in Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online are overpowered compared to their counterparts, with no new balancing implemented in this latest version of the game. Chun Li, Yun, and Ken have long been known to be the beasts of Third Strike, and it's the same situation here. Tournament-level players have had more than a decade to get used to this, but newcomers may get frustrated once they start to encounter the beasts in online play.

To the game's credit, Third Strike Online features a decent number of offline training options to get new players up to speed on its intricacies. Apart from the stock-standard free sparring mode where you can set your AI opponent's basic moves, there's a specific mode just for parry. In this extremely helpful mode, you can "record" the moves of an AI character, before switching back to your own fighter to see if you can parry the attacks. Third Strike Online also features a trial mode, which is essentially a way for you to become comfortable with some of the more complicated combos. Each character gets only five trials, however, which means you're only scratching the surface of the offensive manoeuvres available. The trials also aren't that user-friendly. You're given a list of moves to perform, but there's no way to figure out the correct timing of the inputs since there's no option to view what the combos should look like when executed. The parry trials are the most interesting of the lot, culminating in the near impossible task of emulating the famous EVO Moment #37, one of the most amazing events in pro-gaming history.