Street Fighter Alpha 3

STORY / GAMEPLAY
In Street Fighter Alpha 3 you can choose from a humongous amount of 31 characters. The gameplay follows the typical formula of most fighting games of the series in which you choose your character and fight against others in a one-Vs-one combat, until you reach the final boss. The game is loaded with multiple modes of play, seamless animation and 3 different fighting styles for every character. The main drawback is the GBA's lack of 6-buttons. To work around that, Crawfish Interactive set it up so you can map your attacks by pressing two buttons at once (i.e. L is for Light Kick, and B for Hard Kick! Then, to perform a Medium Kick you can press L+B at the same time).

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics are amazingly detailed, with great animation. Although many of the original stages are missing on the GBA version, each stage has nicely drawn backgrounds. Of course some background animations found on the original and the more powerful consoles have been stripped off and shrunk down to GBA's LCD screen. All the original characters are present. The colors are bright and various special effects do a great job in emphasizing the impact of each hit and the finishing animations. Soundwise, the game is OK, although a good portion of the original sound and music were left out. Most of the sampled speech is missing but a decent amount of the original tracks are still in place, giving the game a good fighting feeling.