Street Fighter Alpha 3 is Capcom’s 1998 arcade fighting game, brought to the Game Boy Advance in 2002 by Crawfish Interactive. The handheld version keeps the game’s three fighting styles, called isms, which change how your super meter works, and a large cast of fighters to pick from. If you own the game, Nagori lets you play it on iPhone and iPad.
What you need
- An iPhone or iPad with iOS 17.6 or later.
- Nagori from the App Store. Your first game is free.
- Your copy of the Game Boy Advance version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 as a
.gbafile, or a.zipor.rarcontaining it.
No BIOS file is needed.
How to play Street Fighter Alpha 3 on iPhone
- Install Nagori from the App Store.
- Copy your Street Fighter Alpha 3
.gbafile to the Files app, in iCloud Drive or On My iPhone. - Open Nagori, tap + and select the file. If the game is in a
.zipor.rar, add the archive as it is and Nagori unpacks it. - Find Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the GBA shelf with its box art and press Play.
Controls
The arcade game had six attack buttons. The Game Boy Advance has four: A, B, L and R, so in this version the shoulder buttons matter as much as the face buttons.
A controller is the best way to play. Special moves need motions like a quarter-circle from down to forward, and a physical D-pad gets them out reliably. Bluetooth controllers that iOS supports, including DualSense, DualShock 4 and Xbox controllers, work with Nagori. A and B sit on the face buttons, L and R on the shoulder buttons, and both the D-pad and the left stick move your fighter. Press the left stick to open the pause menu.
On touch, the Standard layout puts L and R along the top of the screen, far from your right thumb. Open Edit Layout in the pause menu and drag L and R down next to A and B, so all four attacks sit under one thumb. Making the D-pad bigger helps with motions, and the touch D-pad follows your thumb, so a quarter-circle doesn’t slip off the edge.
Practice in slow motion
Slow Motion runs the game at half speed, the computer included. Use it to learn a special move’s motion or the timing of a combo, then try it again at full speed. Assign it to a controller button in the pause menu, or add the ×0.5 button to My Layout.
Saves
Anything the game saves on its own is kept automatically, as on the cartridge. Nagori adds more:
- Quit any time. Leave the app mid-match and Continue puts you back exactly where you were.
- Save states. Pause and choose Save before the last fight of an Arcade run. If you lose, Load and try again instead of starting over. Nagori keeps your last four saves per game.
- iCloud. Save to iCloud and Load from iCloud move your progress between your iPhone and iPad.
Best settings
- Picture Smoothing softens the pixels. Turn it off for sharp, raw pixels, which keep the small fighter sprites crisp.
- Full Screen stretches the picture to fill the display, which makes the fighters wider than they should be. Leave it off to keep the GBA’s 3:2 shape; in Edit Layout you can move the controls into the black bars on the sides so they don’t cover the fight.
- Screen Effects → CRT Screen adds scanlines and a shadow mask, closer to the arcade cabinet the game started on.
