Capoeira Fighter 3: "THE" Flash Fighting Game.

There's a huge difference between saying a Fighting Game looks like a Flash Game, and a Fighting Game that just happened to be created in Flash (Shockwave).

This episode exploring the history and ingenuity behind one of "THE" Flash Fighting game, Capoeira Fighter 3. We'll take a look back at what Flash fighting games looked like at the start of the 21st Century, how they played, and how CF3 established its own identity outside of the slop created in Flash at that time. We hope by the end of this episode, you will understand why Capoeira Fighter 3 is looked back fondly by the FGC.

Links for References used in this episode:

Rooflemonger’s post about looking like a Flash Game

Capoeira Fighter 3: Mizuumi Wiki Page

Official Capoeira Fighter 3 itch.io page

WINP Gamer’s Capoeira Figther 3 Retrospective

Scott Stoddard’s YouTube Channel

Capoeira Fighter 3 Community Discord 

The Original Spiritonin.COM thanks to web.archive.org

For Guest Inquires, Q&A questions for future episodes, and concerns about errors I may have made with the information said in the podcast. Feel free to email me fighthinggamebanterpodcast@gmail.com Don't forget to leave a like or review if you enjoyed

Thanks again for listening and I hope I made your day a little better. 

Transcript

0:05

On October 29, 2025, fighting game content creator Rooflemonger posted a tweet that caught my attention. He said, quote."Saw a lot of dumb posts talking about how the new Avatar fighting game looks like a Flash game. Decided to look at the actual Flash game people are comparing it to. Yeah, I can throw those opinions in the dumpster laughing my a off." And honestly, he's not wrong. Because when people say something looks like a Flash game, they usually mean cheap, simple, low effort.,things along that nature. Every generation of game developers and creators pushes out an overflow of barely, barely playable slop that is created for franchise tie-ins, a few quick bucks, or for laughs. You can see this in various levels of quality and polish in Roblox games today. But if you were around in the early 2000s, you know that this wasn't always true. Some Flash games were doing things that they had no business pulling off. But that's only because some creators felt they could push Flash beyond its limits. So today we're talking about a fighting game that just happened to be made in Flash, but created by an actual game developer who treated it like a proper game engine. Most developers building in Flash would create everything inside it. The characters, the backgrounds, all of it and call it a day. But not this guy. He brought his assets in from outside and only use Flash vector animations for visual effects. In the fighting game community, it's simply known as the Flash Fighting Game. Of course, we are talking about Capoeira Fighter 3 Ultimate World Tournament. Before Steam, If you want to play games online, you went to Newgrounds, Miniclip, Shockwave, Congregate. Odds are you probably found out about games through word of mouth or game forms, maybe in MySpace. Most Flash games used puppet animation through Adobe Flash. Characters were segmented, rotated, and used horrible looking effects for blasts and impacts. If you look at some old DBZ Flash games, you know exactly what I am talking about. oh What really made Flash fighting games look bad was the lack of understanding of basic principles of animation. Squash and stretch, anticipation, exaggeration, secondary action and timing are some of the principles that most Flash games lacked in presentation. As a result, the games look lazy, stiff and lacking a sense of 3D space between the foreground and the background. Avatar Arena was an official Nickelodeon Flash game and it looked like most of the Flash slop at the time. This is the game Rooflemonger referenced when comparing to the appearance of Avatar Legends. Now don't get me wrong, there are some Flash fighting games that people did play. Example, KOF Wing, early KOF games. and were already KOF characters that were already compressed due to KOF games that were on systems like the Game Boy Advance and the N-Gage. This allowed for character files to be smaller without sacrificing the overall speed and feel of the game. Most games like Avatar Arena didn't really keyframe their puppet animations with animation quality and overall gameplay feel in mind. Another Flash game that usually gets referenced a lot is Teen Titans Battle Blitz. The thing about them is they did not use puppet animation. Like they did have sprites so to speak. However, because they weren't vector based, there was very few frames of animation. And instead the speed of the game was mainly based off of after images of one or two frames of character movement. The fluid aspect actually comes from the vector-based animations that you see in the special moves, the ground effects, and hit sparks. But the best animation of the entire thing actually comes from the vector-based menus and overall presentation of the UI. But in order to keep the file size small enough for Flash, the backgrounds are completely static. There are no voice clips for the characters. And there are no idle animations for the characters. So you have no sense before they move of when they're going to move. So with that in mind, one of the main reasons Flash fighting games looked and played rough is simply due to lack of funds and game design experience. Now before I continue, I want to point out that there is nothing wrong with puppetry style fighting games. In fact, one of the better ones that are out there is Iron Saga VS. which is based off of old Japanese giant robot anime. If you get a chance, I recommend you check that out because the puppet animation for the characters is really good in that game. Because they have ideas of squat and stretch, they key frame the animations themselves, the flow of the game is a lot better compared to... Avatar Arena. Not to mention, unlike Avatar Arena, these characters can jump. So the main reason Flash fighting games looked and played rough is simply due to the lack of funds and game design experience. But there was one developer who stood out. His name was Scott Stoddard, and he would create the Capoeira Fighter series. Now, one of the funny things about Scott Stoddard is that Scott Stodder holds the Guinness World Record for the most rubber sharks collected. I know that's weird, literally he's known as RubberSharkMan, if you ever hear that referenced. But he trained in Kapo'a while attending Brigham Young University for game design. After he graduated, he would work for Avalanche Software located out of Salt Lake City, Utah in the United States. But the games he would create would be under his studio name, Spiritonin. Fun fact, he's actually playable in Capoeira Fighter 3 under his apelido, or his nickname among Capoeiristas of Maionase, which is Mayonaise. But even in their idle animations, Capoeiristas are always moving and swaying. So a different approach had to be taken compared to most Flash animations. You can't go like a full 2D rotoscoping for your character like what Capcom did for Elena in Street Fighter III, or fully utilize 3D character movement like Eddie Gordo in Tekken 3 because you're making a 2.5 fighting game And it also should be pointed that yeah, Flash animation, the puppetry thing was not the best at the time. So one of the best things you can do, was to create 3D models outside of Flash and turn each of those animations into sprites. We've seen this used in Rare games like Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Country. but what he did was actually import them into Flash. So to try this out, he created the original Capoeira Fighter in 2002. That game was more of a prototype than a fully realized game. There were only two characters and the purpose was to see if he could actually create an accurate representation of Capoeira. And he did a pretty good job just getting things down. keep in mind that depictions of Capoeira in fighting games outside of Gordo and Elena were very rough and those depictions really came from SNK with characters like Richard Meyer and his protege Bob Wilson. but the second game would be more fleshed out with more characters and took inspiration from Street Fighter and Tekken. the characters that were added in their appearances, show variations in style, even though Capoeira was still the base for the characters. For example, there's a character that's Cobra, is a Capoeirista that combines Capoeira with gymnastics. She has a very petite body and it gives more style to her approach compared to a larger fighter like Bulldog. She fights with a more aggressive style by using her larger body and strength to inflict damage in order to make up for her lack of speed and style. Think of a kind of a difference between Galford and Earthquake from Samurai Showdown, where both of them are actually ninjas, but have different approaches even though they were both trained in the same style. Scott knew, however, he can improve the game. and he would get a chance with help of Shockwave.com. Capoeira Fighter would be released in 2006 with better animation. The characters would actually become cell shaded for their models and the game would actually have a standalone release and hosted on Flash sites like Shockwave.com and Wildtangent.com. But this still wasn't enough. So in February 2008, Capoeira Fighter III Ultimate World Tournament would be released The game's roster grew from 15 to 29 characters and improved by adding more fighting styles like Karate, Boxing, MMA, and the more traditional style of Capoeira, Capoeira Angola. Even though we've talked a lot about the game, there is a story. And the story is pretty simple. A disgruntled student seeks revenge after not getting picked to continue his master's master's legacy. decides to get revenge by creating his own capoeira school. And in order to show the power of capoeira to the world, Mestre Loca created the Ultimate World Tournament. At first, the tournament was just Capoistas, but it expanded to any fighter with any fighting style. Zumbi uses this opportunity to take revenge on Loka and starts to dabble in the use of Black Magic or Mukumba. Capoeira Fighter 3 would, again, the Ultimate World Tournament, would introduce characters that don't use Capoeira. Examples include Angus. He's a dirty Irish boxer that actually throws Molotov cocktails from underneath his kilt. Gator is an MMA fighter from Louisiana who practices Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. And then there's Jimmy Zappa, a former karate kid who likes to sweep the leg. And there's even guest characters from another game developed called Guardians of Altarris. which is a beat-em-up. It features a husband and wife who just happen to be aliens. And just because most of the characters use some form of capoeira doesn't mean they all play the same. Anglerito is an older gentleman who uses capoeira and gola, but in order to bring his opponents closer to him, he throws a hat that can actually pull them in a little bit. Helicopter is a German DJ who mixes capoeira with breakdancing not breakdancing as a form of capoeira. The game had features and mechanics not normally seen in a Flash game, much less a Flash fighting game. But the RubberSharkMan found a way to do it. Capoeira Fighter uses pre-rendered cell shaded 3D polygonal characters. The characters were modeled, animated, and exported as sprites. This process comes with significant levels of file compression that impacts the visual quality of the characters. A good example of this that we can use as a comparison based on similar presentation and hardware limitations would be Tekken Advance released for the Game Boy Advance back in 2001. Capoeira Fighter 3 pre-rendered sprites will be cell shaded compared to the photorealistic 3D pixel sprites from Tekken Advance. The cell shaded renders were more visually appealing and certain character frames were intentionally blurred or smeared to represent greater speed and fluidity of movement. By 2006, vectors used in Flash animation could support better gradients and transparency. These features allow for special moves and super special moves to look more like what you see from a traditional console fighting game, compared to Tekken Advance in their use of solid sprite base, hit sparks, and visual effects that looked out of place representing a character's special moves. Speaking of special moves, we haven't even talked about the mechanics of why this game was amazing in Flash. This game not only had special moves and super special moves, but throws, links, juggles, dodges, and even special abilities that can activate buffs and debuffs. and these usually would trigger after hitting a special combo. Think of this as the early version of the gougi system that you would see in Fighting EX Layer. Capoeira Fighter's characters had voice samples and like Tekken Advance, it was also a tag fighter. But Capoeira Fighter supported four players in tag mode with each player able to play as a single character. So this was done 20 years before 2XKO. And while the actual backgrounds themselves were static, bot era of NPCs playing in a rota would give stages a sense of life and energy to an otherwise flat background. Capoeira Fighter III aimed for an authentic fighting game design and it succeeded. We will now take a small break and when we come back, we will talk about what happened after Flash died. Because in 2019, when Shockwave and Flash shut down, most Flash games just disappeared. Shockwave.com and WildTangent.com still technically exist, but they are shadows of their former selves. But Capoeira Fighter actually did not disappear. In fact, it got better. In 2024, Scott Stoddard would release a legacy beta nearly 20 years after the original Capoeira Fighter 3 was released. The legacy edition beta has added new features like hitbox data, input display mode, the UI has been revamped. Visual effects like hit sparks, lighting, and even the hyper FX, activation effect animations have all been improved. And there's new character artwork from Adam Ford. even though you can still select Scott's original artwork if you prefer. All 29 characters have been adjusted and rebalanced, and at the time of this recording, four characters have had new updated character sprites. Also, combo breakers or bursts have been added, so you don't have to just sit there and ride that long combo. And unlike the original version that was only frames per second, Legacy runs at a full 60 frames per second. and the game is actually playable online via Parsec. Granted, if you want to use your stick or controller, you'll have to use Joy-To-Key to actually configure your buttons. And you also are going to have to adjust that display to 640 by 480 upon launching the game. There's no standalone console or Steam release. However, this game has been tested and it can run in Steam Deck. There is a community Discord and it is run by the RubberSharkMan. There you can find sketches and images of the development process, as well as the character pages to improve your skills in case you actually want to play people online or local versus. And yes, you will be able to find opponents in the Discord. Just make sure both of you are running the same version of the Legacy Beta if that's the version you choose to play. There is also a Mizuumi page, but that is based primarily on the original Capoeira III Ultimate World Tournament. And the reason I said this in comparison to the Legacy version, because that version is still the one that a lot of people prefer to play online. So make sure you have the correct Legacy beta if that's the version. you choose to play. Now just to bring things full circle, I agree with Rooflemonger that Avatar Legends does not look a thing like Avatar Arena. what most people were making the comparison to was as far as the character animations, as well as the lack of a 3D space in reference to the background. But besides that, I completely agree with him. But there is something kind of wild about Capoeira Fighter 3. The amount of effort that went to the development of this Flash game is nothing short of amazing. It shows that knowledge, creativity... and just plain ingenuity can surpass the alleged limits of a game engine that was never supposed to be pushed this hard. It's no surprise that Capoeira Fighter is constantly mentioned in the comment on social media, like the Rooflemonger post, whenever Flash fighting games and other fighting games with Capoeira Fighters are mentioned. I'm sure will have the same argument again and again and again. But instead of Flash, we're gonna be saying it looks like a Roblox game and we'll be judging Roblox fighting games by their level of polish versus their level of enjoyment. Some of the highest rated and popular fighting games on Roblox are Box Fruits, Slap Battles and The Strongest Battleground. None of these games have the level of polish and gameplay mechanics like Crash Out, RoFighters, and Dueling Grounds. However, there are very few videos with players outside of the fighting game community that talk about these more polished and traditional styles of fighting games. But in the end, it's whether you enjoy the game or not, regardless of its visual quality. So the next time someone says, that looks like a Flash game, maybe remember this. For over 20 years, fighting game players have been saying this Flash game is actually legit. And Capoeira Fighter 3 may be the best one to ever do it. My name is JonisBrasko and this is the Fighting Game Banter Podcast. whether you agree with me or not in this assessment. I'm looking forward to hearing your banter. Thanks again, and I hope you have a good one.