Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: Bonus Round!: Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection

The Marvel vs. Capcom Collection is out and with its widespread availability, Capcom has some more ammunition under their belt.  While doing the Capcom vs. SNK series I’ve had to skip all but the last two games included in this collection, but now that I can finally play them, it’s time to fill in some gaps and maybe make it something of a review of the collection as a whole..

I had previously stated that when this collection came out I would go back and edit the included games into their respective year, but on further contemplation, that could cause a mess for consistency because there’s the possibility of these games elevating Capcom just enough to retroactively score a win for a year, which would make future posts referencing victories contradictory.  Therefore, this bonus round is going to give Capcom a few chances to reclaim a point in the competition and allow me to evaluate the 5 games I didn’t get to play before.  I will conclude each one by determining if it was good enough for Capcom to have had a better showing in its release year than SNK’s games.  In the case of years where Capcom won, all they have to do is not have the game be a disaster than brings them down.

To briefly touch on the Marvel vs. Capcom Collection itself outside of the marquee games you but it for, it’s a pretty good package, if a little basic.  The bonus features are standard, with the standard scanline, frame art and screen size options.  I would even consider having online play on the PC pretty standard by this point, but it was nice of them to allow the one non-fighting game to be played online as well.  I would’ve understood if they didn’t bother.

The online play works nicely and it corrects the biggest mistake made in the Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection.  In that collection of 7 different games, you have to go into separate matchmaking for each game, so you have to hope that someone is playing the exact game you want to play and (I think) the same region version with no way to tell if anyone is already waiting.  In this collection you can select any combination of the 6 fighting games you want to be matched up for in either or both region versions.  You can play in the single player or training mode for any of them while you wait and anyone else wanting to play one of the same games will be matched with you.  That’s the way to do it.

Its bonus offerings are a step below the compilation releases you see from a company like Digital Eclipse, such as their aforementioned Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection.  Like a Digital Eclipse release, this collection’s gallery has every piece of artwork and design document they could get their hands on poured into it.  This includes posters, design documents, promotional flyers and full body shots of the versus screen portraits from Marvel vs. Capcom 2, which in-game only show the head.  That and the standard music player is all there really is, as opposed to a Digital Eclipse timeline history lesson or the digital history book in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection by M2, both of which have interviews with people related to the included games.  The Marvel vs. Capcom collection goes the mile, but not the extra mile in that regard.

If I may go on a tangent while on the subject of game collections, get the Castlevania Dominus Collection!  If you think 50 dollars for 7 classic arcade games is a good deal, try 25 dollars for 3 full-length metroidvania masterpieces plus a brand new top-tier classicvania.  It too has a big gallery for each game and they have their codes rewritten for optimization on more modern systems, which means the baseline resolutions are increased, making them look as good as they possibly can.  Keep in mind one of the included games is sold by scalping scumbags for 60 to 100 dollars.

With that off-topic plug out of the way, it’s time to go over the Marvel licensed Capcom games, starting with not a fighting game, but a beat-em-up.

The Punisher (1993)

Aaahh 1993.  Back when The Punisher logo wasn’t associated with right wing extremists calling for violence, Nick Fury was white and Capcom was still on their beat-em-up kick.  When Frank Castle’s family is killed by mobsters to hide witnesses of an execution, he goes on a vendetta against organized crime with the possible help of Shield leader Nick Fury, if you have a second player.  Since it’s a story of fighting organized crime in New York in the Marvel universe, Punisher’s sights are set on The Kingpin.

The setup of you and a buddy going down rough and tumble city streets smacking around street punks with martial arts to take down a crime lord who employs crazy super villains isn’t dissimilar from Final Fight and true to form, The Punisher plays a lot like it, but with upgrades.

The Punisher has a decent number of moves he can do, weapons he can use and can even use grenades for crowd-clearing.  There’s dashing, sliding, piledriving, giant swinging and it wouldn’t be pre-ninja Punisher without shooting.

For some reason the shooting only happens in select areas, usually when the enemies are armed with guns themselves.  For game design purposes I get that blowing through the game by shooting reduces the cool martial arts moves you can do and makes things a little too easy, but in-story I don’t understand why the Punisher would do this.  It’s not like he has a sense of fair play.  I thought maybe he conserves his ammo for when he really needs it (there’s a reason he has hidden weapon caches), but then he doesn’t pull it out when confronted with Bushwacker, who can turn his arm into a gun.  I don’t get it.

Even if the Punisher license wasn’t involved, it’s a great beat-em-up.  Every hit on the enemies is consistently satisfying with the occasional blood, screen shaking and bouncing off the walls. The combat of going from enemy to enemy, throwing them into each other and dropping grenades in a pinch is faster and flows better than in Final Fight.  The game consistently changes things up in the environments, enemies and the shooting sections so it never drags on or gets stale.  Those occasional shooting sections, where you don’t need to be close to dish out damage, do a particularly great job at breaking up the melee action and they’re their own kind of satisfying as you can pick up enemy firearms and still lay the smackdown on enemies that get too close.

The Punisher game is one of Capcom’s best beat-em-ups, up there with Captain Commando and Battle Circuit, but not quite up there with the Alien vs. Predator game.  If I had my way there would be a spiritual sequel to this game using the Punisher’s new ninja arsenal made by one of the many indie studios specializing in these types of old-school beat-em-ups.  There was a 4^th Streets of Rage game made decades later!  It could happen!

As for whether Capcom this affects Capcom’s loss to SNK in 1993, after thinking on it and applying my scoring system, Capcom’s The Punisher actually pushes Capcom through.  The failure of the unbelievably shallow Saturday Night Slam Masters hurt Capcom in 1993, leaving them with only 1 decent game and 1 ok game against SNK’s big winner Fatal Fury Special and their other consistently not-terrible games, excluding 3 Count Bout, but even 3 Count Bout was better than Slam Masters.  It’s a situation where the better of the worst from each company clenched it.  Punisher was just the shot in the arm Capcom needed for that year to make up for Slam Masters and establish a consistent high quality.  That’s one point stolen from SNK, giving Capcom a 2 point lead!

X-Men: Children of the Atom (1994)

The X-Men are no strangers to games and back in the 90s they were particularly big.  I knew a lot of people big on them, I was able to read one of the silver age comics back in elementary school and they had a hit animated series that could almost rival DC’s Batman animated series.

They were a perfect franchise to adapt into a fighting game.  The promotional flyers have Jim Lee’s hardcore artwork, some of the in-game graphics look just like his work and they even got the voices of Cyclops and Wolverine from the animated series.  For a Japanese-developed game in the 90s with only short voice clips, it’s wild to me that they bothered to get any of the actors.  Sure there are only 10 playable characters (and 2 bosses), but at last players would be able to fight using their favorite X-men and B-list villains (no offense Silver Samurai).

Tragedy struck when Capcom decided to make the game play kind of like Darkstalkers.  The first Darkstalkers.  The bad one.

Children of the Atom has everything that made the first Darkstalkers an unpolished mess and I think it may be even worse.  The combat is trodding and clunky.  Like the first Darkstalkers, it seems to want to be a game with combos, but almost nothing cancels into each other and several moves have so much startup to them that they don’t flow into the gameplay and the movesets of characters themselves are very limited.  Compounding the bad gameplay, the balancing in this game is buck-wild.  Well-placed multi-hitting attacks do less damage than some simple projectiles.  Some characters are so fast with their attack that they can always beat another to the punch and some moves seem damn near useless with how slow they are and they don’t have higher damage to compensate.  Usually one of the big threats of a command grab is that it can't be blocked, but not in this game.

The worst part is the computer opponents.  It’s bad enough that the game plays poorly, but the computer opponents make it practically unplayable.  Even at the lowest difficulty level they flagrantly cheat.  Whatever you do, they will always know what you’re doing before you start the animation to the attack.  No matter how much you try to mix them up or fake them out, they’ll have the perfect counterattack and will know exactly how to take off half your health in one combo with that counterattack.  Don’t even bother dashing to close the distance because they will always hit you if you do.  It seems like the only way you can consistently do damage is wait for them to get in leg sweeping range and hit them that way.  They’ll almost always block it, because they’re cheating, but you might be able to chip them out or get a lucky shot in.  Doesn’t that sound like fun?

It’s a shame because the game looks great.  The backgrounds and sprite animations might be even better than Darkstalkers.  Too bad it’s wasted on this trash.  The only fun I had is some online matches where me and other players try to work around the jank, but it’s obvious just from watching that this game has no finesse.

This is the kind of game that would normally take away Capcom’s victory for 1994 so they’re lucky that SNK made the worst fighting game ever made that year.  They get to keep their win.

Marvel Super Heroes (1995)

Not content with a game focused solely on the X-men, Capcom expanded into the wider Marvel universe.  Now some of the X-Men characters join other big-name Marvel heroes and smaller-name villains to find the Infinity Stones and fight Thanos, who has partnered with Dr. Doom.

A big gimmick of Marvel Super Heroes is the Infinity Gems.  You slowly gather them over the course of arcade mode and they can be used once per match for a different effect, but a heavy hit can cause them to be dropped and picked up by either player.  This creates a similar situation to the dropped items in the early Samurai Shodown games, where you want to try and position yourself to get the gem while also reading what the opponent is going to do.  Knowing when to use the gems can give a player an edge.  They aren’t exactly a boon that changes the tide of the battle because their effects are fleeting, but optimal use is rewarded.

The Infinity Gems compliment combat that is already good enough on its own.  Marvel Super Heroes plays like Street Fighter Alpha or Darkstalkers 2.  Combos are easier, character animations are even better than in Children of the Atom, super jumping has enough mobility for practical use, air combos are now possible to an extent and the action flows nicely.  The better character animation gives every strike more weight and impact and there are now big full-body shots for victory screens to let characters express their triumph.  The computer doesn’t cheat either, at least not as obviously as in Children of the Atom.

Marvel Super Heroes further differentiates itself from other fighting games of the time with character-specific quirks that go beyond their special moves.  Iron Man can fly, Captain America has to pick up his shield if it gets blocked, Wolverine slowly heals and even for a fighting game The Hulk is positively gigantic, closer to Potemkin than Zangief.  These abilities combined with the Infinity Gems having an added ability for certain characters thrown into the mix make for some spicy matches and an enjoyable fighting game.

Capcom didn’t need this one to win 1995.  They already won that year.

X-Men vs. Street Fighter (1996)

Now THIS is what I’m talking about!  This is where the Marvel games really hit their stride.  Tag teaming means double the characters on both sides and double the options, with the character count now expanded to 16 to accommodate it.  It’s easy to pick up and play, but if you put the time into it you can do some crazy stuff with air combos, tag combos and well-placed super attacks.  I should know it’s easy to pick up and play.  I distinctly remember playing this game at a pizza place at least 2 decades ago, before I knew how to play fighting games, and I was able to beat it.  I had a blast.

Super jumps can lead to epic aerial clashes, advancing guard gives a movement option in the face of a barrage of attacks and there is a deep satisfaction when both your characters land both of their super attacks on your opponent at the same time.  The final boss really drives home the Marvel games being bigger and grander-scale to match the super powered comic characters, as Apocalypse is a giant background boss more like one you would expect to see in a beat-em-up game rather than a fighting game.

The sprite work is as good as ever, some characters from previous games got much-needed tweaks to accommodate the faster gameplay, backgrounds look nice and change as the matches go on and I just love the detail that the background music changes to a variant of a character’s theme when they’re mandated into the arena.  Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Cross Generation of Heroes did the same thing later on, but for its update, Ultimate All-Stars, it used stage music instead, like MVC2.  For me it was nice getting to hear that implemented again.

It’s a big winner for Capcom, but not enough for them to steal SNK’s point for 1996.  Like I said in that post, SNK covered all the bases and brought out even more envelope-pushing games to arcades.  SNK had Metal Slug, KOF 96, Neo Turf Masters, Twinkle Star Sprites and Samurai Shodown 4.  Capcom had Street Fighter Alpha 2, this game and Super Puzzle Fighter 2, which are all great, but they were never going to top the volume and quality of SNK’s 1996 library.  It was one of the best years SNK ever had.

Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter (1997)

This is like the Pokemon Blue to X-Men vs. Street Fighter’s Red.  The SNK version of Card Fighters Clash to X-Men vs. Street Fighter’s Capcom version.  It’s the same game with a different character selection.  There are some tweaks to the characters, maybe some added moves or changed commands for the returning ones, and the endings are different, but the stages, almost everyone on the Street Fighter side and even the final boss is the same as in X-Men vs. Street Fighter, just with one more final boss tacked on after him.

Since the gameplay is so much like the previous game, it’s still a great, fast-paced, combo-heavy tag team fighter.  It’s just that it feels like Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter only exists for the specific people who wanted to use Captain America, Omega Red and Dan instead of Rogue, Gambit and Cammy.  I suppose it has a purpose in that sense, but did they really have to re-use the stages too?  I know it came out only a year since the last game, but SNK could do more in that time.  It’s not even like the updates Street Fighter 2 had because it took characters out and nearly everything it added to the gameplay isn’t new.

The only brand new content it could have had is the joke character Norimaro but that was taken out of the English version.  In the collection you can change the region to Japanese and select him, but even still it’s only one character that’s not re-used.

I guess Gambit and Rogue wanted to sit this one out.

It fails to innovate in any meaningful way so Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter doesn’t give Capcom the edge they need to take 1997 from the likes of KOF 97 and The Last Blade.

Since I was able to get my hands on the two Marvel vs. Capcom games before this collection, they were already factored into the competition so I don’t need to go over them again, but I will note that since these are based on the arcade versions of the games, it means Marvel vs. Capcom 2 doesn’t look or sound quite as good as the HD version from a decade back, nor does it have the expanded widescreen view.  It still looks great and all the background animations look sharp and fluid, but if you set it to full screen there’s noticeable aliasing.  I also noticed that the ending artwork is different from the HD console version.

In this bonus round, only The Punisher allowed Capcom to take a point from SNK.  Capcom now leads in the competition by 2 points, which means, seeing as there are only 2 rounds left, SNK will have to win both and hope for a tie.  In the next part we’ll get back on track as the two giants’ best versions of their best games of the 2010s era go head to head!