They dared to ruin a wonderful franchise by butchering up the controls !
So I was really happy to see the latter released for PSP with some extras...
ALAS ! As soon as I tried the game, I discovered that Capcom, yet again, rushed a port to get it on shelves for a launch and did it all WRONG !
The D-Pad controls are a horrible pile of imprecise, unresponsive junk, the buttons are weak, and even the "easy" motion does not save the game from being overly frustating due to sloppy, if nonexistent motion detection...
Hell, you can play SFA 3 Max with the analog stick AND Dpad, but NOOOOO that would have been too cool on Darkstalkers, so you have to struggle with that bulky, cumbersome DPad instead of flipping your moves easily with the analog stick... The PSP, furthermore, is not suited well for 6-button fighters, so you'll have to fumble to find a good setting...
The game is par with the arcade, though some scale changes were made to the sprites and backgrounds, nothing excessive, but noticeable still...
All in all the game does a good job of regrouping all Darkstalkers characters and mixing gameplay modes with each other, but, frankly, the miserable controls completely RUIN... even worse... MAIM the experience, and since fighting games rely on gameplay... Well you'll be better off reverting to either arcade versions of Darkstalkers 3, or the PSX version (you might maybe even emulate it on your PSP rather than wasting your time fighting the crap controls, provided you can use the analog stick to play instead of the dreaded DPad...).
Graphics and sound wise the game is really a blast, and I really love the graphic style, but the worthless controls simply kill every single value, tilt, or simply fun, because pulling out the special move you want becomes as hard as back to Street Fighter (yeah, the very first one)...
Capcom, it's for that kind of epic, unacceptable, unforgivable failures that I hate you...