Accessories

Excellent, but make sure your Memory Card is 1GB or less
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max is far and away the best fighting game for PSP, however's there's one huge caveat: it only recognizes Memory Stick Pro Duo cards that are 1GB or less. Here's Capcom's lame response, directly from their customer support site:

"Please only use a memory stick under 1 gig. The game came out before the advent of sticks capable of storing over 1 gig of memory and is unable to recognize memory sticks 1 gig and larger. This issue is prevalent in some older PSP games and not limited to just Street Fighter. There is no patch planned for this issue."

OK Capcom, so it's not YOUR fault, right? Shame on Sandisk for releasing Memory Stick Pro Duo cards larger than 1GB. How dare they? I'm sure Capcom could collaborate with Sony on a patch for this and include it in an upcoming PSP firmware, but apparently that's not worth their time. I'm knocking a star off my rating for this ridiculous bug.

That said, Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max is a great game, and if you're an old-school Street Fighter fan you'll be in heaven.

Street Fighter on PSP.... Sweet!
This port of Street Fighter Alpha 3 is a must have addition for Street Fighter fans that have a PSP. The game is responsive but its not as easy to pull of familiar combos. I chalk it up to the some what awkward PSP button layout but you get accustomed to it over time. The only thing to watch out for is a bug in the games inability to recognize free memory over 2GBs. I have a 8GB memory stick (which I also bought on Amazon.com for an awesome price) and all my other PSP games recognize it with no issues. I tried Alpha 3 and it doesn't recognize it. I researched the issue on some online forums and found the solution is to use up the memory to under 2GBs of free space. At that point, the game recognizes and saves data just fine.

The Game I Reach For First
I am a casual gamer these days, but was a rampant SFII fan in my teen years. I can recall the glory days of arcades and have fond memories of SFII on my SNES and Genesis.

This is an evolutions of the above-mentioned SFII. The same play mechanics are there, the same fun is there, and the same replay value is there. As the title of this review says, it is the first game I reach for when I pick up my PSP. I keep coming back to it because it is fun, has memprable characters, has great graphics and sound, and can be challenging as well.

This is a great addition to any fighting fan's library and is perfect for any fan of the Street Fighter II series.

IT'S GOOD!!!
I like this game, you already know why if you've seen my other reviews. Go buy it if you like this kind of game.

Classic Street Fighter Gameplay.
If you like the classic Street Fighter gameplay then you will be right at home with Alpha 3. It has all the classic Street Fighter characters and also new characters. There are many mode like team battles, 2 on 1 or 1 on 2 battles, World Tour, tag team battles, and finally arcade mode. You can customize any characters by giving them different abilities like recharging hyper gauge etc.

My only complaint is that the controls might take some time to get use to especially the left shoulder button. I don't particularly like the new characters and there isn't an in game move list during Training mode so you have to go to the manual.