Summary
Capcom must hate Nintendo's gamers
The Good
The controls are dead-on perfect, and the overall graphics are pretty good. Not to mention the tons of modes you can choose from to keep the play fresh.
The Bad
Ooh, where to start . . . tiny characters, repeating backgrounds, low-res graphical design (noticed only after playing on SP), games gets hard for no reason after three characters (I don't mean the usual Capcom hard, I mean like "stupid" hard, where you don't want to play anymore), music is just as repeating, certain sounds missing. This's not the way to do this, and Crawfish has been known to wonders on Game Boy hardware before (Bust-A-Move 4, Street Fighter Alpha 1), so there's no excuse for giving us the "Genesis" version of Alpha 3 on 32-bit hardware designed for 2-D games. Since this is a cart, it's ROM can be expanded, it could've had special chips put in, etc., etc., seems like Capcom wanted a buck again.
The Bottom Line
With the PSP version in "fat-screen" (when 4:3 screens are ignorantly stretched to 16:9, give a fatso appearance on everything, which annoys me) and this version in low-res, I'm at a loss of which copy I'd want. The version that's on PSP could've easily been done on GBA (ask Square Enix, and even Capcom's own Breath of Fire series), it's a 32-bit machine will all the same RAM as the PlayStation, minus the polygon processor. There's no doubt they had in mind that they'd bias themselves to Sony (and yet, Capcom still can't figure out why their profits are down, look at all of the used copies of their games at a GameCrazy or GameStop just sitting there) and slap the Nintendo faithful who made them who they are in the face with this. If you've never played Alpha 3 in any other form, you'll be impressed, but us Street Fighter Experts know this isn't what could've been. Maybe Capcom and the other NES Legacy Companies should start rewarding us with REALLY good conversions of their games (like Square Enix and Nintendo does) instead of hating us for sticking to the Big N.
