The 3rd Strike Retrospective

Hi there.

Several years ago, I wrote the below piece and pitched it various outlets for 3S's 15th anniversary. It was never picked up, and that kind of bothered me. Not that I think that this is a chunk of unrefined genius or something (there are lots of problems to edit), but maybe this was too much of a part of me and I couldn't let it go. I hung on to it, and today, USGamer.net posted a more timely birthday celebration to 3S I wrote that has bits and pieces of what was originally there. This is probably self serving, but I thought you might like to read how it was and maybe glean a little bit more what this game means to me. I hope you enjoy it.

Note: This is a unaltered and very, very rough draft.

If I can pull it off, she’ll never read this. She’ll never know.

It will die with me like the mounting lies of a terrible man shackled by his own misdeeds, at least for now. In time, I might be able to solve this for myself as it is a ruin of my own making. But that could be years away, and this Urien just got off the ground to meet the business end of a punch to the face. Another punch comes, and then the screen freezes with a flash of light while this nobody Ken combos into a fury of spinning kicks as a vomit of profanity quietly spews from my mouth. There should have been some defense, here. There should have been a parry followed by an embarrassing chain reaction that only an assured ass-kicking will bring. But not this time. I am playing 3rd Strike. I am playing it on a brand new 4K television. There is input lag. I’ll never tell my wife, because that’s what love is.

Our relationship is complicated, this Street Fighter game and me. It is the second revision of a fighting game that, by the time it was released, met with shrugs from the general populace that had since moved away from the franchise’s arcade salad days. By 2000 when it hit the Dreamcast in the US, we had already seen how Final our Fantasies could be with polygons and tried to decode the batshit zaniness of Tekken genealogy four times over. But the Street Fighter III series of games always held an oddly sinister air about them, as if they seemed to be made for an older crowd than mine even though I could legally drink when I finally got my hands on them. Ralph Bakshi making anime, but really loony anime. I bootlegged it on Dreamcast and then received it as a gift for my PlayStation 2, but I was too busy aggressively shitting my time down a sewer of dozens of subpar JRPGs to really get to know 3rd Strike; I’d play it, but never with the monastic devotion it demanded. But it was with me through my entire adult life looming behind me; a presence forever lingering over my shoulder.

Somehow, against every law of nature, Capcom made Street Fighter IV and fighting games were back in the collective nerd gestalt. In 2011, realizing that they needed to keep making money on these things, the publisher finally updated 3rd Strike for consoles. Ok, I told it, let’s finally get to know each other. Third Strike took off its glasses and let its hair down. Six years, several joysticks, and hundreds of thousands of matches won and lost by a wakeup parry timing later, it whispered back “what took you so long” like a goddamn Cameron Crowe movie.

To be sure, mine is not a name that will be spoken at tournaments in hushed, reverent tones. I will never fly to Japan to prove my mettle; never go down in history with glorious displays of showman-like comeback gusto (maybe!). I am no chump by most means, but I’m also not willing to live a life of lies. But, by God, I play it enough that I may as well have programmed Third Strike myself. A weekly meetup at a local bar with friends. Another evening at home online as my wife and baby sleep. I study YouTube matches several years-old during bored lunch breaks and discuss the game with friends routinely. I play a lot of video games, but Third Strike and I, we got a thing going on. It’s a devotion, and a respect, and a pursuit.

That’s what love is.

Our first joint purchase was an Olevia television. It was made via the coitus of two government stimulus checks prospected on sharing a living space –taboo to my family at that point as there were no rings on any fingers. But we saw our nascent lives together built on promise, much like the television industry of 2008 saw in high definition viewing. Though I can promise you that this paragraph did not intend the television set in question to be a metaphor, in fairness, I need to tell you that the Olevia gave us almost ten solid years of reliable use. It is old and breaking, but still welcome in the the genial rest home of a spare bedroom. Olevia as a company no longer exists –my marriage, thankfully, outlasting it—but its gift to the world will live hallowed within our house.

To be honest, though, it was sheer stupid luck and a really good deal on a television that the Olevia was as perfect for fighting games as an HD setup could be, as this fantastically beautiful new 4K job currently living in my family room can attest. You see, as HD televisions became the norm, the horrid side effect of the time between a user’s signal, the moments it is encoded into the console, and the milliseconds this takes to be decoded by the television for display means there is an incremental time delay we call input lag. Basically, if I hit a button, I expect the character on-screen to react instantaneously (or as near to it as possible). By their construction, older cathode-tube televisions never had this problem, but without getting to be a bore about it, it’s a problem of HD sets that manufacturers either choose not to fix or never bothered to care about.

To the average person, or one that may have begun playing games in the HD era, it’s infinitesimal; a frame of animation lost here and there. For games that demand a certain precision, though, this is a problem. For Third Strike, which demands frame-specific precision, however, it’s almost a deal breaker. The 4K television was an assumed, inevitable purchase after we bought our house a few years ago; something larger for the family room because we had the space and beautiful beyond measure because I’m a snob. But we’re talking two people with a baby and a mortgage. If science and human nature had taught us anything, it was that only a buffoon spends their shekels on a television outside of the right Black Friday deal, so patience was key. But we could wait no longer; the Olevia was drifting quickly into a peaceful grave of busted screen pixels. You also get an extra 5% off with your Target card. We bought a new television.

But I didn’t do my homework. Some 4Ks on the market are optimized for low input lag. The second I entered the character select screen, though, I knew what I was in for. I could feel it. When errant Aegis Reflectors don’t trigger after a Chariot Tackle and Denjin Hadokens refuse to spring to life after a carefully timed Shoryuken, I can (finally) no longer blame the booze sitting next to me for botched matches and losses that we can charitably call unearned. This was a flaw eight years in the making from one TV to the next, and as I hoisted the Olevia in its monstrosity into the solitude of this spare bedroom, feverishly concocting how I might still use it at night without waking my family as the primary mode for Third Strike consumption, I concluded that I just didn’t know what I had until it was gone. I can’t fit it into my tiny, storage-only basement, and the loud clicks and slaps of buttons and sticks does not a comfortable sleeping environment make on the second floor of my home. I stared at the Olevia, and it looked back at me; weathered, a veteran of a now drifted age. It was time to retire, and time for me to let go.

That’s what love is.

As love affairs go, the Olevia Era was action-packed. We weren’t quite engaged before its purchase (when the Target card was opened, now that I think about it), but that wasn’t far off. It nestled into the one-bedroom apartment we eventually shared for more years that I want to admit in perfect fashion; its 42” size a monolith. Connecting it for the first time to my PlayStation 3 with a then-very expensive HDMI cable –a term I had never heard before this—nearly brought a tear to my eye while watching the intro to Assassin’s Creed. It was a time of optimism and promise, of unknown excitement and rebirth. But that first Assassin’s Creed was shitty.

We played Rock Band with my friends and out-of-town family whenever we could after our wedding a year later, the Olevia’s speakers beginning to crackle at the loud tone that late night apartment parties could bestow (often stumbling drunk while channeling our inner RJD). It was one of the few video games she would often play with me, because that’s just the sort of experience Rock Band was. My wife liked things streamlined, and not the war of wills that Third Strike becomes at mid- or high-level.

We fell asleep in front of the Olevia after chemotherapy, stuffing food in my mouth as quickly as possible before further sickness prevented me from eating for days at a time. I would push her out of the house to see her family on weekends, her reluctance to leave often amused me while I sat in silence forcing myself to break Demon’s Souls over my knee. The truth was that I often didn’t want her to see me that way, weak and hollow. Plus, she needed time on her own, and even cancer can’t force two people to be in the same space at all times.

We slept on the foldout couch for a month; movie after movie after terrible comedy after terrible action movie. I had to make sure she didn’t move too much in bed after the mastectomy, and we decided that we’d cut out the middle man and just stay in front of the Olevia since that’s where she’d spend the majority of her recovery. You can only tell someone how beautiful and perfect they are during their worst moments before it sounds callous and disingenuous to them, but she, at least, never let on if that was the case.

We literally threw the couch down a stairwell after bed bugs infested the apartment building. Having been forced to sleep on it for months while our bedroom became a demilitarized quarantine zone, we found a house as soon as possible, and in an act of enraged, satisfying defiance, made sure that no human would use the infernal sitting implement ever again. The Olevia and PlayStation were lovingly packed (and dutifully doused with various bug killing chemicals) for their new home.

We had our timing down: I go to bed at midnight, she got up around 2:00am for feeding, and then I’d be up again between 4:00 and 5:00 while she slept, my baby hearing the early morning cries of “Snake?! SNAKE?!” before drifting back into a nap. At least my baby’s earliest memories won’t have to be incessant, pretentious rambling about ripped jeans in this one, I would think to myself. All of that side info is on optional cassette tapes. I listened to them anyway.

She never complained, only accepted. Often, it was just a matter of overcoming and moving on. Burn within you, now, the image of a man trying to cram a brand new, giant television into his car; for it was Cyber Monday and a decision was made. The store was crawling with slack-jawed idiots on a similar mission, and no employees were available to help him find out the hard way that his trunk was too small. Recoil in horror as he nearly injures himself to stuff it within the back seat after a long, frequently bloody battle with the baby chair. Cheer at his triumph as he comes home to his wife and child with a brand new 4K television, one that will replace and old and trusty friend. Light a candle’s vigil in sadness for Third Strike, a love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name, and how I can never let on that things will never be the same. As a supportive wife whom is, yes, beautiful and perfect, she would feel guilty; she knows what fireballs and parries and dragon punches mean to me. It’s too late to take the TV back now, so I’ll do the best I can, copious bullshit and inane losses along for the ride. She doesn’t need to know. I can never tell her.

That’s what love is.

John Learned is a freelance writer that wrote something you just read. He tweets sometimes (@john_learned) and is slowly, lovingly annotating Symphony of the Night on YouTube.

Annotated Appendix: Urien

While the Ibuki video might have been the hardest one to put together so far because of how little I knew of the character, the Urien video was challenging for the opposite reason -- I might know too much.

I'll explain. This video is the one I've been waiting to make all along. When I originally envisioned this project when closing in on the finish line of the Annotated Symphony of the Night, I thought how interesting it would be to make a video out of Urien alone. Collectively, the internet has figured out quite about the character already, and the official supplemental material filled in the gaps nicely, but it never felt concise to me. Sure, everyone kind of figured out how he's basically a bronze Greek statue come to life (figuratively), but that was largely the depth of it. Nobody got into the minute physical characteristics, or the implications of the name, or the dopey miss-localisations of his attacks. For that matter, I had never seen a video or piece of physical media that tied those things to his gameplay. That's where this series started to take shape; it was a thought experiment that I tried to make work as a series of character studies. So, when I say that he is probably the thesis statement for the whole project, I hope it makes a little more sense. It all started with this character, and I'm happy so far that there are plenty of interesting things to say about everyone else that it didn't end with him.

Except there's just so much going on with this guy that I found myself getting really deep into the weeds with his script. After a while, I took a step back and cut a few large chunks out of it because it was already getting long. These happened from the gameplay side, mostly. There's some much going on under the hood of most fighting games, this one in particular, that it gets hard to draw a line between what the world should know about a character and the game that he's in and what only the hardcore need to know. You've probably figured this out so far, but I've used each character in the game to illustrate one or two little things hidden within 3S's mechanics. Urien ultimately has four that I went over: the EX Super (or hidden supers), charge partitioning, alternate input commands for special moves, and the unblockable setups. For most other characters in the cast, this is too many for one individual video, but in his case, each of them define his high-level gameplay because players exclusively use his Aegis Reflector super in tournaments. It's true that I could have waited to use one or two of them for other characters (say, Remy showing off the alternate inputs), but I felt that these characteristics define this one individual more than most, and into the script they went. It's likely I'll run out of neat, "hidden" stuff to talk about in the future and will feel that Urien bit me in the ass here, but that's the point I'm making, I suppose: it's tough to know when too much is just enough.

I promise you that the Akuma video coming up will be just as meaty, but will come loaded with the same problems for me. There are a few "hidden" things to discuss about the inner workings of the game, which makes sense given we're talking about a perennially hidden character, but I've already axed plenty from that script because it's just too hardcore, and the hardcore already know about that stuff. Perhaps I'll circle back around to those things when I start to run out of that kind of stuff to say, but I suppose we'll find out.

I've also realized that I should be linking to some tutorial videos or something for some of these characters. Maybe I'll start doing that soon, but for now, let's talk about actual gameplay for a sec. I know Urien gameplay pretty well, but I'm shit at charge partitioning, which is an important component to high-level play. For all of the reasons I stated above, I purposely didn't go over the specifics of it because there are piles of videos on the internet about CP. For whatever reason, I figured each video would give people interested in learning the finer points of gameplay incentive
to do some further digging, but that might assume too much. Therefore, here's a few links to vids that each about CP that I found better than most:

Partitioning for Dummies
Urien Charge Partitioning 101

Plans are still sort of formalizing for a final episode, and it will probably include shoutouts to 3S true believers like The Shend that have been spreading the word for the last 20 years of competitive SF3 play. Let me know if that sounds good or not.

Anyway, thanks again for watching these. Please leave comments and ask questions. Sadly, I have some freelance work to get to over the next few weeks so the Akuma video might be a little slower coming than I'd like, but I can at least promise one about every month, so let's tentatively shoot for mid-April. After that is a full video on the parry system, though that will probably be much shorter (and harder to edit) (whoa is me).

Annotated Appendix: Necro

Now we're getting somewhere.

I was a little intimidated by this episode until I got into the writing. The Ibuki ep was difficult to put together, especially since she's a character I was never really interested in as an observer or invested in as a player. Necro for me was the same thing on both counts. But this one turned into the tightest episode so far from both an editing perspective and writing. I'm pretty happy with it.

If you've watched the previous episodes, you'll probably notice that this one didn't compartmentalize things like normal moves/special moves/ supers like the other ones had, and that's because Necro players sort of rely on opportunities for hook punches wherever they get them. Knowing that I was just going to lead into descriptions of that move and its applications, the gameplay section of his video was a straight line there and how his Super Arts complement the hook punch. I like that it wasn't just "here's this, and then this, and then this." Future episodes will employ this same approach, and some more than others.

The first part is more interesting for me, though. Yes, it's a lot of speculation on my part to infer that Necro has some sort of connection to Pagilacci. But as one of the comments rightly pointed out, Capcom has been very stingy over the years with real design notes for any of the SFIII games, at least in English. Outside of obvious visual influences for characters like Alex and Hugo, inference and speculation is all we can really go on unless proven otherwise, which is the direction I took the script here. The FGC and larger gaming community has pitched in over the years to make some connections and suss out possible influences for a lot of characters with little to no design documentation for us (me) to go on, so don't be surprised to hear these things bubble up in future episodes.

Having said that, Necro is a character that I've really come around to after putting this episode together. I don't really see myself using him for really competitive matches since I'm too old and have too little time to practice new characters, but I get why people like using him and have fun tinkering with him now more than I ever had. But now I'm wishing more people had put the time in with Necro so he would make for more of a tournament draw. Sugiyama videos (which you should look up) are great, but it can't be just one guy carrying the Necro torch!

I've got a script written and am laying down the voice for the next video, Urien, later tonight. The new PC is fabulous for editing video -which was the whole point of buying it- so I'm confident that I can put together the next ep as expeditiously as this one had come. After that, it's on to writing the Akuma episode, which should be on the long side. Further into the future is an episode about the parry system. Should be late into February, I'm thinking.

Thanks again for watching!

Annotated Appendix: Ibuki

Hi there, Happy Near Year, and happy week-after-Cooperation Cup!

Again I find myself apologizing for a long delay, but I think it was worth it this time. I have a new desktop with a lot of muscle, and this made editing the current video a little easier than on my poor, rickety old laptop. The added bonus is that I can work on the desktop at home and occasionally do some things during my lunch break at my 8-5 on that laptop, which can double my output. See? All good things.

The truth is, Ibuki was a hard character to script and just as hard to edit together. Nobody I know plays her with any kind of seriousness, so I needed to look at a lot of footage and supplemental material to be authoritative on gameplay. Her monstrous move set made things pretty challenging, and well, I kind of got a little lazy with the Holidays looming this year. So there you go; in all honesty, this video was hard to make, and I wimped out a little bit making it.

Now that it's behind me, though, I can see why people like to play Ibuki, especially a few folks I know that are hardcore KOF players. But I don't ever want to touch this character again. Not that she's bad, mind you. One of the cooler aspects about fighting games is roster size and depth and how a player gravitates toward characters that they connect with. I don't connect with Ibuki. She has unique qualities, but after busting my hump to get this video edited over the past few days (in between family obligations and watching Coop Cup matches), I'm burned out just looking at her.

But what a time to be an Ibuki fan, though! The Pre-Coop Cup grand finals had an Ibuki team for the first time in the tournament's history, and this video series can help the lay person demystify what they actually saw. Sadly, those brave heroes that made it that far into the tournament with a mid-tier character didn't win it all, but that just goes to show the strength of strong play with a slippery character coupled with intimate knowledge of SFIII's other systems. It was a great tournament this year, and even greater seeing some mid- and low-tier pros get in there and put on a clinic.The next few videos are for Necro and Urien, two characters that also had some nice, crowd-pleasing moments in the hands of a master players (look up that RX comeback over an Akuma that was pounding him into dirt). Look forward to those.

Aaaaand speaking of the next videos, the wait should be shorter for Necro than it was for Ibuki. I'm deep into the editing process for his episode, and about halfway through writing the script for Urien right now. The latter of which is the longest script so far, but that could be because of both my character bias (I play a pocket Urien and so do a few friends) and the fact that he's got a lot more to unpack about his design than a lot of people may realize.

Anyhoo, thanks again for watching these videos and any support you throw me on YouTube, Twitter, and especially Patreon (gotta pay off this new computer somehow). Pretty soon, we'll be getting through characters that I kind of dread and onto ones that I have more working knowledge of (and with much more out there about their design history), so get excited.

Annotated Appendix: Sean

Secret: I love Sean. I don't know if it's because he's such an underdog or something else, but he's always appealed to me as a character, and I love pulling Sean out of my pocket when I used to go to weeklies or the occasional tournament. Sean's got a lot going against him, as this video certainly demonstrates, but his moves are so odd, his short-range game so quirky, that other players just don't know how to deal with them (the fact that nobody plays Sean probably helped, too).

For this video and his spot in the series, though, Sean is an important link in the chain of truth that I'm trying to pull on regarding the Street Fighter III games. The prevailing myth around them, that Ryu and Ken were never meant to be part of the cast and that angry/ bewildered players demanded them at location tests, is only partly true. Honestly, it even seems that it's only a small part, too, if recent interviews are to be believed (and they are).

What gets tricky here is that there is a lot more info out there about the SF3 games, but very little of it is translated in English for us to comb through (again, we need to bow down and thank whatever god you believe in for shmuplations.com). I have a handful of Japanese strategy guides and fan books that are just pages and pages of text from developers, and mostly about the first SF3 game, New Generation, that I certainly can't read. I know others out there are working slowly on getting some of these things localized and on the internet for people like me to use for projects like this, but this takes time and can be expensive if you hire someone to do it for you (though the price is typically worthwhile). What I'm getting at it is that there could be more info about what actually happened with development, and perhaps some evidence that refutes what I personally found, but this info isn't readily available yet, so we have to use what's at hand. And what's at hand, in this case, is that Sean was a super late-game development inclusion. If you play him in New Generation, I would argue, you can tell.

Anyway, this episode came a little quickly because I worked two scripts in advance after the Attract Mode episode. It also helps that I know Sean and his gameplay. What I don't know, though, is depth for Ibuki and Necro, the next two on the roster. Sure, development notes and design info aren't a problem, but I need to get into the lab for these two to really dig into them. That means the next episode or two might come a bit later than others (especially Ibuki. She has nine target combos and nine command normals. Nine. Apiece!). I'm going to try to go a few scripts in advance with these two as well, because I think that worked out pretty well.

Last thing: Sean's MP-HK target combo definitely links into SA3, but it's frame perfect, meaning the timing is absolutely fucking bonkers. But it works. I promise.

Annotated Appendix: Alex

Whew, here we are. Want to know what's hard? Fighting game videos.

Honestly, that's part of the reason I'm doing this game as a series. The SOTN stuff was all straightforward; once I plotted out the correct course through the game, it was just a matter of getting from points A to B in each video. Fighting games aren't like that, though, and I took this on as a challenge to myself to become a better editor. You could say it's been a learning process.

First, going through movesets for characters is a bit bland, and I feel as though this video in particular didn't make it any better. I miscalculated how much varied footage I should have gotten for move examples, which is why you're seeing a lot of repeated clips of moves here. As the time allows, this should change going forward.

Second, I can do all of the moveset stuff on my own with a training dummy, but actual match footage is another story. I recorded everything that bookends the videos in May because that was the only time I could get together with other 3S players I know to have some legit footage. I don't want to pull random match footage from online games. Not only are they unpredictable from a quality standpoint, part of me (and I know that it's probably all in my head) doesn't think that's fair to the other players that I'm essentially using them without their knowledge. I know there are tons of YouTube videos that do nothing but pull online matches and replay them, but that's not me, and not the point of what I'm trying to do here.

The nasty byproduct of that is, well, I don't have a good Alex, and neither do many of my friends, so the actual match footage is pretty lousy. Sure, there are some nice parry moments and a few situations that I come back around to in the VO later in the video, but it's pretty mid- and low-tier stuff. I'm sorry to say that you're just going to have to get used to that as we move ahead. Between the three or four guys that are going to help me with record matches, our knowledge of the roster is fairly wide and varied, but it's not all-encompassing for high level play. Hopefully, the stuff in the VO and the side window will make you forget that none of us have an Ibuki in a few weeks.

This brings up a good point about this particular video: there just wasn't that much to say about Alex. I mean, sure, I found some nice tidbits for the guy from the usual sources, but he couldn't possibly have as much meat to him as series regulars like Ryu and Ken (you can expect those videos to be on the long side). It did, however, dip our toes into what makes this game --and fighting games in general-- so fascinating to me on a character level. Most characters in this genre tend to be cobbled together cultural forces. By that, I mean that we have representations of folk heroes, of pop culture icons, of mythic figures. In some characters' cases, it's a lot of that stuff cobbled together. Yes, this can get very speculative. I've found no concrete evidence that Alex is named after Alexander the Great. However, when we get to other characters in the game, particularly those that have a relationship with Alex, we'll see that possible references like this fit contextually when we step back and take it as a whole. I think you'll know what I mean as I get deeper into the cast.

From a more practical side, the movest footage is still windowed because I needed to make references to other stuff on the side, but it winds up sitting in front of lots of empty space. Curious what your thoughts are because this might evolve, but future videos might do away with that format in the second half so there isn't so much dead real estate.

Sorry that this took so long to develop. I'm still working out some of the kinks here, and the VO on this particular episode is straight up bad, and these are things I'm actively working to fix. If I ever find the time to circle back to some of these for any kind of remastering, this will be the first video on the list. We'll see.

Thanks again for watching. Your feedback is always appreciated if you have a second. I'm already hard at work on the next episode, so I'll hopefully have another one up in a week or so.

Annotated Appendix: Attract Mode

Whew. Ok.

Honestly, I was beginning to think this whole thing was cursed after the problems I've been having. I had most of it edited together, and then found a few factual inaccuracies. I rewrote much of the script, and then got super sick to the point where I couldn't record my voice anyway. Then I went on vacation. Through all of that, I'm still waiting on YouTube to approve my Membership Programme status. Strange times.

Anyway, this episode was more or less an information dump. Most of what was said here wouldn't comfortably fit into character eps, so I had to stretch out the attract mode for more than 10 minutes, which is why you're seeing yet more random match footage. These are captured online, incidentally, so if you're a little upset that it's not high-level play, well, it's because I just felt like using Sean. Also, I'm only really an above-average player at best. Now you know.

The primary sources for this series info are interviews I've compiled from various online sources, art books from over the past two decades, and Japanese game magazines and strategy guides. Much like the Annotated SOTN episodes, you'll hear me reference back to a few specific things more often than not. The CFN interview with Sadamoto is a good starting point, so we should run into that quite a bit for specific characters. What's important, though, is that I show as much of the game as I can, which is symbiotic to interviews and references, so this episode was primarily used to get some general things out of the way before we get into specifics.

Obviously, accuracy is key, and occasionally, that takes some time to really nail down. Case in point are the Judgment girls, which many believe to be specific to a character's stage. I have found that they are not. This took a little longer to get right than I though, too.

I hope you enjoy the episode all the same. I'm already deep into the script and recording for Alex, and we should see that in a few weeks.

Thanks again for watching!