After digging through the menus and seeing everything that's been bolted onto it, it's clear that there are some folks at Capcom who care a great deal about making Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition the definitive version of the game for modern consoles. It starts with an arcade perfect version of the game and spreads out from there with a ton of unexpected options that make this much more than just an online version of a beloved 2D fighter.
It starts with a heavy in-game achievement system that looks similar to the one found in Capcom's Final Fight: Double Impact. Some are multitiered, so you'll finish level one of the EX move achievement by doing five EX moves, then another level for something like 25 EX moves or so, and so on. Some of these are tied into the platform-specific achievement/trophy system, but most of them are there to give you points that can be spent to unlock fan art, music, concept stuff, and so on.
It will have online play, powered by GGPO, which is some awfully solid net code. It will also have an elaborate training mode that breaks down the game's parry system as well as providing combo training for every character. Unlike Capcom's other fighting games, you can actually preview each training challenge to clearly see exactly what the game is expecting you to do. And it expects you to do some pretty rad stuff, including this little number, which is simply addressed in the game by its now-famous name, Evo Moment #37:
== TEASER ==In addition to all this, there's an insane list of toggles that let you modify a lot of things about the game, like rules about how specific things cancel right down to basics like the ability to disable jumping. It almost looks like you could use these switches to come up with a full rebalance of the game, if that's what you're after. The game also contains a bunch of video options for sprite smoothing and optional scanlines, in case you're looking to duplicate the look of an old arcade cabinet.
In short, this downloadable release is packed with features that should make it a definitive version of the game. It'll be interesting to see if any players that were brought back into the fighting game fold by Street Fighter IV will be interested to go back and see a game that, statistically speaking, they probably skipped upon its initial release. If not, it'll almost certainly find a crowd among the fighting game faithful.