I think the major reason is that the feeling I got from listening to you guys that got to me so much was, "fighting games, prolly even games in general, are more meaningful/fun to play with friends."

I'm very deeply enjoying your podcast so far, and I'll DEFINITELY be keeping up w/ it (also need to backtrack and listen to all of 'em).

It should be noted that the Capcom games put up for balance comparison were not chosen at random; those three machines (CvS2, MvC2, 3s) were literally set up adjacent to each other at the Bearcade.

So, in the interests of establishing a proper discussion, a question: Which 6-7 MvC characters and 3 3s characters did you picture when making that previous statement? My experience revolves more around 3s than MvC2, obviously, so I suspect I know which 3 you had in mind for that, but if there's been some sort of paradigm shift in MvC2 that brought someone out of the Assist Character niche, I'd like to know.

"Sagat is +10 over everyone else" is balanced?

No, bullshit. That argument is thrown out on account of its idiocy.

And at least somewhere in 6 to 7 characters are viable in MvC2, in Third Strike it's 3.

Capcom has plenty of balanced fighting games under its belt. Super Turbo (and HD:Remix if you want to count that), Alpha 2, Alpha 3 (though Alpha 3 is balanced by the same virtue of MvC2 in that all the characters have crazy shit, so it evens out, just that the *-Ism's aren't balanced), SF4 right now is looking to be the best game yet for balance.

"Compared to this game is good." doesn't work.

But yeah, great stuff. Quite a few points in this one where I just wanted to jump in the conversation.

I'm sure I actually burned the skin on my thumb on those stupid playstation controllers that had the friction grip on the d-pad.

Fun days!

"Third Strike is very balanced" (paraphrased)

...I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this statement.