Maybe it's just me, but this game seems very outdated compared to games 2+ years older than it. While I can understand the desire for SNK to have put it on Neo Geo hardware, it really shows the age of it... either that, or the game was just a hack job. The character graphics were relatively decent, nothing spectacular but not as horribly pixelated as some complained. The special moves animated decently well, and the fire effects on the moves that had them seemed to flow nicely. However there are two areas that really irked me: A) Super move graphics Yuck. Compare Bison's Exceed with Street Fighter Alpha 3's version of the same move. The SFA3 version looks amazing (nearly crap a brick 1st time I saw it) and the SVC one looks very plain. The alpha channeling on the move doesn't work at all and it is clearly a flicker effect, plus it's so much less grandios (short range instead of full screen, etc.). Finishing move graphics ... of which there are none. Even most KoFs had a red flash at the end of the round. Here you get zip, zero, nada. Not even a big KO sign. Once you get past the graphics, you get to the gameplay, which unfortunately is worse than its two predecessors. While I'm no big fan of either CvS game (CvS1 = Nakoruru pixie fest, CvS2 = Roll Canceling), both play better than this. Multiple characters have infinites. Zero is basically untouchable by 1/2 the cast, ditto for Goenitz. A real shame, this could have been at least as good as CvS2, or KoF2k2, both of which have their problems, but are lots of fun until you get really good at them.
