I want to make a quick note of this rather than talking about SF3: Third Strike Online Edition itself at length. The recent Xbox/PS3 port of revered failure/classic Street Fighter 3 Third Strike is a fairly loving port with a lot of extra content and care put into it... until you get to the online modes. I don't know how this happened. My experiences are limited to the Xbox version. There has been a patch, but I noticed no changes to the major problems.
First and foremost, ranked matches don't work in this game. If you pick "ranked", the game will search for a few minutes.(Yes, minutes.) At the end of the search, nine times out of ten, an error comes up and you're sent back to the main menu. The tenth time, you're matched up with somebody, anybody, often with a terrible connection. Getting to this screen is not a guarantee that you'll play a match: the game still errors out half the time here. This is a completely broken mode and is by itself inexcusable.
Player (unranked) matches are just poorly designed. The setup is the same as most fighting games: you start or join a lobby and press a button to say that you're ready. The problem is the "ready" mechanic. Press a button and you effectively take a place in line. As soon as another person enters the room and presses the "ready" button, the match immediately starts. This presents a number of problems.
First, I am forced to ready up to keep my place in line. For example, if I start a room and don't ready, and two random players enter the room and press the button, guess what? They have their match right there and then. This means that I don't have time to look at my opponent-- their connection speed, their disconnect rate-- and decide whether I want to kick them or play a match with them. I have to accept every single person that comes into my room, or I don't get to play. This leads to a ton of laggy matches and rage quitters.
On top of this, there are a number of bizarre bugs, most notably one that permanently switched my disconnect stat to 4 billion percent. Other bugs switched players from 1P to 2P (and vice versa) in an online match, glitched out colors, and other minor, weird stuff all over the game.
I do not recommend buying Third Strike Online, especially not at $15. Despite GGPO netcode, the online modes are either broken or merely lousy. The game's full of weird bugs, and rather than saying anything about fixing the game's many problems, Capcom would rather announce that they're charging for silly shit. Quite frankly, you can get a better experience illegally on Supercade. Vote with your dollar. Guardian Heroes should be coming out soon.
That's really odd how you're having so much trouble with ranked matches. While, yeah, it can take a few minutes for me to get a match on ranked I do get them and only about one or two had some sort of lag; the rest have excellent to very good connections.
Sorry to hear you're having problems.
Posted by: LandofObscusion | September 01, 2011 at 01:29 PM
Shitty online in these DLC re-release games is my pet peeve (Contra, DOOM), so I never thought I'd post in defense of a game with it.
You seriously don't think $15 is a reasonable price to pay for the offline component? I don't own PS2 sticks, have to worry about HD lag, and so on. $15 is a bargain to put aside that hassle and let me use the sticks I have, and not have to deal with putting a disc in. Even if ranked gets to the quality of GGPO, I won't give a shit; I don't consider GGPO to be acceptable in the first place for serious 3S play.
TL;DR version: For once, I don't care that online is broken, even if Online Edition is in the title. This is Third Strike, Arcade Perfect without the Bullshit Bugs and Console Idiosyncrasies Edition.
Posted by: Spankminister | September 01, 2011 at 02:27 PM
I think $15 is fine for the offline component (I've bought 3S more than once myself), but when you list the bullet points I expect them to actually be filled out. This is a case of delivering really poorly on what was promised, and I don't think we should excuse the game (especially a port like this) for achieving half of what it set out to.
Posted by: David Cabrera | September 01, 2011 at 02:39 PM
The timing is also different (at least on the ps3) - windows are smaller for parries and execution.
Posted by: Chris | September 01, 2011 at 03:30 PM
"I do not recommend buying Third Strike Online, especially not at $15"
"I think $15 is fine for the offline component"
The offline component costs $15, the broken-ass online component comes free.
Posted by: Spankminister | September 01, 2011 at 03:40 PM