Street Fighter III : 3rd Strike - Arcade (1999)
0I'll be the first to admit that this was not my thing when it first came out. I know this sounds strange, but at the time, I didn't even know it existed. I was paying less and less attention to gaming magazines at the time, on or offline. This was also a point where I didn't do much new gaming outside of a few RPGs. I did know about the Zero/Alpha series and I just naturally thought that was the follow up anyway. When this was introduced to me, it was very pretty, but it didn't feel immediately familiar and trying out new characters just left me lost and feeling like a newbie for the few minutes I had to try it out every so often.
So I disregarded it like so many others did and stuck to things like Soul Calibur, Tekken, and the KOF series. I could admit it was pretty, but that was about it at the time. Now that I've returned to it a few times, I can say that I was completely wrong to shrug it off. I still don't know the moves or the possibilities, but it is a lot more fun to play than I gave it credit for. I love the presentation and the animation it really damn good. While I like Fatal Fury 3 better for personal reasons (and that'll get uploaded in a moment), they really do stand side-by-side as pinnacle 2D fighters.
Definitely getting copyright dinged for the intro music, but whatever, it needs to stay.