Online gaming has genuine health benefits.

1. Pain Relief
   Games relax and help sufferers of depression or other mental disorders cope with pain. They also help chronic pain sufferers by distracting and raising their pain threshold.
2. Weight loss
   Video games have recently become interactive where instructions have to be obeyed by the gamer. This unthinking obedience engages the player in positive activities to make the player physically sweat, increase their heart rate and engage in other healthful activities.
3. Increased Self-Esteem
   The improved physical circumstance resulting from gaming is coupled with an increase in self-esteem, e.g., losing excess weight. Some people have survived neurological and emotional troubles by gaming.
4. Fitness
   Despite the weird terms like exergaming and exertainment, games have made it practical to become fit and healthy without having to go outside. Perfect if you live in inclement climates.
5. Improved Social Skills
   In 2008 a Swedish researcher carried out a social experiment using a game with a group of under-motivated 15-year old, poorest performing students for a whole year. The study noted that the students who were often loners or belonged to very small social groups got to know one another better, improved grades markedly and showed an even larger increase in communication skills.
6. Improved Dexterity
   Playing games allows the opportunity to improve dexterity among surgeons which means less mistakes in the operating room. A study done discovered that video games improved dexterity among surgeons—they worked 27 percent faster and made 37 percent less errors than non-gamers.
7. Stress Relief
   Games produce that feeling of satisfaction needed to cast away the stress of modern life.
   To survive bad days a yearning to topple galactic tyrants, slay dragons as large as mountains and obliterate enemy combatants with missile launchers even in virtual reality is de-stressing.
8. Improved Eyesight
   Online games can improve the sight of people who have a lazy eye or have trouble driving at night. It is said that video games can increase contrast sensitivity.
9. Learning
   Games provide new knowledge like learning about renaissance Italy, getting to know the national flags of the major foot balling nations from the team select screen in FIFA, what type of cars were driven in the 40’s.
10. Faster response times
    A lifetime of twitch gaming teaches a person to respond more quickly in real life.
    A study in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science showed that players of video games regularly scored higher in reaction times when tested.

In 1999 Third Strike was a craze in Japanese arcades but many new games have been created since then. Is it still near perfect twelve years later?  Third Strike is a classic, a scientific work

of genius. It has won over dozens of fighters. Its revolutionary ideas and procedures, namely the Parry system and EX Moves, became the foundation for many games in the genre up to the present. As an example, Mortal Kombat uses a super meter system similar to Street Fighter 4, an improvement on Third Strike‘s “Super Art” mechanics.

Due to changing times, the arcades for which the game was designed have been replaced by online games. Third Strike‘s online implementation leads the way of other fighters. In every scheme, evading is faultless without detectable delay. However, fights freeze briefly at times due to connection issues. Neither frame rate drops nor “faltering” effects occur, which plague other online fighters. The game’s mechanical reliability is whole throughout each competition.

The online multiplayer modes Ranked, Player and Tournament are designed with dangerous, spirited play in mind. Player matches can be programmed to say, best two out of three rounds or possibly best four out of seven matches, each match composed of four out of seven rounds. Particular characters can be barred from the lobby. The only weakness of the Player match implementation is its inability to save replays if more than two players are in a room.

Tournament mode has the same personalized fight options as in Player matches without character bans. Four to eight players are arbitrarily grouped in twos and split into brackets. Winners press forward, losers are free to leave or stay to observe the combats.

Unfortunately, Tournament mode’s matches happen successively, rather than simultaneously. The player in the fourth bracket can fight only after the first three fights are done. This is time consuming as players would rather fight than watch others fight. On the other hand, the single player experience has ample bells and whistles to keep series veterans amused, while showing new contenders the oh-so-technical ropes.

Capcom should be praised for designing an unbelievable full-featured matchmaking system despite the minor defects.