Depth

One way to judge the quality of a fighting game is its depth. I tend to mean, by this, how much you can enjoy coming back to the game over and over again, and how much you can continue to learn and grow in the game, without having to be a fanatic about it. Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper offers this in spades. One of the main ways in which a good fighting game does this, of course, is by offering a diverse and plentiful character selection.

The last two evenings, it's been the only game I've played, and I've been re-acquainting myself with characters that I haven't played in a long time. Years, even. In fact, for several of these characters, I haven't really played around with them since I only had Street Fighter Alpha 2 on the SNES to work with.

I don't mean by this that I like a game to be overly technical and difficult to learn. In fact, I think that's a mark of bad game design, and for the characters that are overly technical, I think that's a bad design as well. The "deadly rave" type combos that SNK seems so fond of? Bad design. It's a barrier to entry to other players, and only appeals to an increasingly smaller subset of hardcore players. Same thing with characters who have to chain combos together in order to get any thing done. Angel? Great idea, but terrible execution, sadly. Even SNK's poster child, Kyo Kusanagi, suffers from this a bit in the more "recent" games.

But Street Fighter Alpha 3 manages to offer depth without offering over technicality. You don't have to be a pro on the competitive circuit to appreciate the character selection. The last two nights, I've played around a bit with Fei-Long especially, but also Guy and Gen, and I even re-acquainted myself with Sakura a bit. Despite all the years I've had this game, I've got a long way to go to let some of these other character breath and become comfortable to me. And yet, I find that I'm excited to let that happen, for years to come.

And that is the hallmark of good game design.