14. Street Fighter III: New Generation (1997)

Back in the ‘90s the common joke was that Capcom couldn’t count to three. Then, when Capcom finally stepped up with 1997’s Street Fighter III: New Generation, no one liked it.

Arcade operators hated the expensive new CP System III (CPS-3) hardware, even as it enabled the smoothest, most beautiful sprite animations the genre’s ever seen. The cast was fresh but weird, to a fault; players bemoaned the lack of familiar faces. Balance was poor, and infinites abounded. You could cancel special moves into supers (now dubbed Super Arts), à la the previous year’s Street Fighter EX, and a revolutionary new “parry” system offered the potential to completely change the meta, though even the developers didn’t yet understand that innovation’s true ramifications

Capcom had finally counted to three, but New Generation’s strangeness, small roster, expensive hardware, and perhaps most of all inchoate roughness all sapped its potential to make the sort of splash Capcom needed. A beautiful start, but it would take a couple more revisions to get the long-awaited third mainline Street Fighter into peak fighting shape. — Alexandra Hall