The Stun Bar
Below your health meter there's this little black bar. While it is not immediately obvious what it's purpose is, this is actually the stun meter. In the earlier Street Fighter games, the stun meter was hidden to the player, and a character is always stunned after a couple of hits that is enough to fill the meter. In 3rd Strike, the stun meter is visible to both players, and each can know how much their stun meter is filled up. Some attacks fill up a lot of the meter, some just a little, and some that don't fill it at all. After some time without getting hit by an attack, the stun meter will slowly empty.
What is Stun?
Before we give a more in-depth explanation of the mechanics of the stun meter, we're going to explain what stun is. When your stun meter is full, it instantly empties, and your character is knocked down even by a non-knockdown move. He will soon get back up but looks disorientated with cartoonish objects flying around his head. During this state, you're vulnerable to everything your opponent throws at you, and you could be forced to eat a combo and/or a super art. The only way to reduce the stun time is by button mashing. Every direction or button press takes a frame off of the stun time, so be sure to unleash a storm on your controller of choice. Fast fingers can take off as much as 6/7 of stun time.
Meter Lengths
Like the health meter, every character also have stun meters of different lengths. However, there are only three different meter lengths a stun meter can have, which are the long meter, normal meter and the short meter. Obviously, the longer your stun meter, the more you can take before you're stunned. The characters and their stun meter lengths are listed below.
- Long Stun Meter - Hugo, Gill, Alex, Q, Dudley, Oro
- Normal Stun Meter - Urien, Ryu, Ken, Makoto, Sean, Elena, Chun-Li, Necro, Twelve, Yun, Yang, Ibuki
- Short Stun Meter - Remy, Akuma
Stun Times
Depending on the last attack that fills up your stun meter, the game will assign at random, four preset durations in which you are stunned. Here are the numbers without mashing:
- Normal move - 90 or 110 or 130 or 150 frames
- Normal throw - 120 or 140 or 160 or 180 frames
- Special hit - 150 or 170 or 190 or 210 frames
- Special throw - 120 or 160 or 200 or 240 frames
- Super hit - 120 or 160 or 200 or 240 frames
- Super throw - 150 or 190 or 230 or 270 frames