Tips for Street Fighter Alpha 3?

It depends. What hardware are you playing your fighters on?

 

PC. it's mostly emulation.

 

Ah! well for such, I use a Qanba Q4RAF stick. It suits my needs perfectly as its compatible with PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. I own 2 at the moment.

This is the model i own:

http://www.arcadeshock.com/items/qanba-professional-joysticks/qanba-q4-raf-xbox360-ps3-pc-3-in1-joystick-q4-3in1-detail.htm

 

gonna have to save up for that then c:

 

It's a good investment IMO. Especially if you plan on getting a bit more involved with the genre over time.

 

In anticipation of Mortal Kombat coming to PC tomorrow, I went and bought a Xbox 360 Street Fighter 4 arcade stick. I did a few games of old school MK, along with some Killer Instinct 2 and SF4, and let me tell you, for a joystick set-up that only cost $50 dollars, it seems very well built. Feels authentic as hell also, i felt like i was standing in an arcade in 1996 playing KI2 again.

This is the stick i got, albiet this is the PS3 version, and i got the 360 version.

 

That's an okay stick, though arcade stick enthusiasts will thumb their nose at the build quality. Besides aren't these sticks closer to that 90s experience:

I never knew about balltops until SFIV came out, battops were and are still pretty common with regular arcade cabinets.

 

Bat tops are the old American (and kind of European) standard, ball tops are the Japanese standard. Back in the 90s bat tops were popular in the west however as time went on more people started importing Japanese arcade cabinets and with companies like Sega, Hori and Namco etc pushing the arcade stick import market, ball tops slowly became the standard. I guess now Japanese developers have strong markets in the west and they have companies like Mad Catz making licenced products and pushing sponsorships, they've pretty much replaced the bat tops in the arcades as the ball top standard in the home.

 

@DC16... yes, the stick you posted would feel a lot closer for MK games, however, I also wanted a stick to play Killer Instinct and SF4 with. Its a lot easier to make MK work on a two row button setup than it is to make KI and SF4 work on a MK-style setup

On the subject of Battop versus Balltop, while most of the arcade fighters i played in the 90's did indeed have a battop, The local arcades Killer Instinct 1 and 2 machines both had balltops, and i fell in love with them. To this day i still prefer a baltop over a battop. Personal preference, nothing more

 

That button layout would be horrible for anything other than MK.