what about street fighter alpha 3 "UPPER"

[walls83]

Has anyone played this version.?

[Minwah]

Nope, never heard of it!

[walls83]

It was only released in japan.  It has extra characters

Fie Long
T. Hawk
Balrog
and a couple others.

Its the dreamcast version of Street Fighter Alpha but for the arcade of course.

[Procyon]

As walls83 mentioned, this is essentially the Dreamcast version of SFA3 ported back to the arcade, with the the additional characters automatically unlocked.  You can get a feel for what was done with the SFA3 Upper version ported to the GBA.  However, this version also has 3 characters that appeared in Capcom vs. SNK 2 added to it as a bonus.  Maki, Eagle, and the dude from Rival Schools are not found in the arcade version.  If the GBA wasn't so horrible to play fighters on (in contrast to a real arcade, that is), it would be the best version of SFA3 but the lack of 6 full buttons really detracts from the play experience.  If you were really clever about how you mapped buttons to keys, and set the configuration in a GBA emulator just right, you could eek out a fully playable experience.

[chris2922]

And its a damn good one...

[tetsujin]

If the GBA wasn't so horrible to play fighters on (in contrast to a real arcade, that is), it would be the best version of SFA3 but the lack of 6 full buttons really detracts from the play experience.

I think the GBA version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo was a lot better than the port of Alpha 3...  Like the sound is still poor and the limited button count is a bit of a problem, but I think they handled it all much better in SSF2 than in SFA3.  I played Turbo and considering the limitations they had to work with it's a good port...  but Alpha 3 really disappointed me.

[Gunstar Hero]

I have basicially all of the good 2D GBA fighters, and the technically (graphics and sound wise) King Of Fighters 2 is the best IMO, but I'm pretty sure I play Guilty Gear X Advance the most.  It's so much fun, and very similar to the DC/Arcade versions.

The Street Fighter games suffer too much from the button loss. 

[Tritoch84]

As a reguler poster on Shoryuken.com, I'd like the chime in on this!


"Upper" was indeed only released for japan, in responce to the many "V-ism is broken" complants. It balanced some chars that were way to overpowered, and did some polishing.

This was the worst thing that they could have done, evidently.

It sold horribly, nobody wanted to play it, and it did nothing but help SFA3 lose more of it's already diminishing fans.

You can pick Balrog/M.Bison in Alpha 3.

This is NOT A DREAMCAST VERSION PORTED BACK TO THE ARCADE.

The US got screwed as far as a good port go. All of them are useless for tournys, as all of them do very lackluster jobs of bringing SFA3 to the console.


Most everyone sticks to SFA3, not "Upper". (in Japan).

[Gunstar Hero]

I don't see where we got so screwed on Alpha 3, but okay...

Japan got SFZ3 for DC, PSX, Saturn and GBA. The US got SFA3 for DC, PSX and GBA. The exact same versions. I own both PSX versions, the DC version (which is not SFZ3 Upper, but is called "Saikyo Dojo") and the GBA version which is "Upper."

The Saturn version is very nice with it's 4-Meg cart support/requirement, but uncommon and therefore expensive.  I shoulda bought one back in the day, but the DC got my gaming dollar then. 

The PSX version was damn nice for a PSX version of a Street Fighter game, totally unlike the horrible PSX SFA2. It lost just a bit of animation, and the more elaborate intro/win sequences, but was pretty dead on playwise.

The DC version was like the PSX version with arcade perfect everything and all the secrets already unlocked. Nice. 

The GBA version is missing 2 buttons, and kinda sucks. 

To me it looks like Capcom just did what they usually do, streeeeeeeeeetch a game out, such as "Street Fighter 2 Turbo Champion Edition Hyper Fighting" and "Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha." 

[Tritoch84]

Oops! I ment to say NO ONE got a good port of Alpha3, if you played it in depth at all, it's obvious.

The best of the worst was the Dreamcast port.

One of the reasons Alpha 3 doesn't have a tourny scene is because of the lack of an arcade quality port, and the machines are getting kind of hard to find.