Marvel vs. Capcom 2

Lately, I've been interested in the Capcom superhero games made under license from Marvel Comics. These games include X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The new one looks to be based around Street Fighter IV graphics and (presumably) engine, so it stands quite a bit apart from the other games in the series. X-Men was the first Marvel game done by Capcom. Coming out in 1994, it had to have been in development concurrently with the first Darkstalkers game, and like that, it uses upgraded "line art" style animation. This animation style was to last at Capcom for years; some of the exact same sprites originally drawn for 1994 releases were still being used in new games as late as 2005---until the release of the Street Fighter IV game, really.

Anyway, barring the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3, about which we only know limited information anyway, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is the crown jewel in the Marvel vs. series. Probably the most popular and well known in the series as well. And while it did make a number of improvements to the series... in many ways, I've always been very unhappy with this game at the same time. Here's my complaints, one at a time:

• The presentation. Good heavens, the music is terrible! Simply embarrassing. For that matter, the backgrounds aren't very good either. A few of them pass muster as "OK" but pretty much all of the prior games in the series had better ones. The acid trip carnival background is particularly bad.

• The gameplay has been simplified, and that's mostly welcomed, but at the same time, the ramping up of the tag-team battle from two to three opponents really makes matches drag out unnecessarily. Two was kinda fun... three is not so much. Frankly, I'd still rather just play one on one anyway. You'd think as a King of Fighters fan it wouldn't bother me so much, but I never liked that in the King of Fighters games either, and luckily I can easily play most of those in single character mode.

• While this is a factor of all of the Marvel Capcom games, it seems worse in this one: the game is simply too hyper. It moves too fast and does too much. It rewards button-mashing nearly as much as careful strategic play, which is really difficult to do because of the speed anyway. I think the advent of Turbo modes in Street Fighter was a good thing, but there comes a point where faster is not better, and this game is way on the wrong side of that line. Slower moving games like Fatal Fury's Mark of the Wolves are still tactically very rich and deep without needing to be on a Ritalin.

• The unlocking phase is painfully slow. I've had this game for years and I still have a few alternate character colors to unlock. Part of that is that because of the other problems I have with the game, I don't really play it that often, but part of it is that it's just terribly, terribly slow. The newer re-releases of this game don't feature any unlocking, by the way. It comes with everything pre-unlocked. I don't mind some unlocking; it can even be fun for a while. But this is way beyond fun and into abnormally frustrating and tedious.

• There are way too many silly characters, most of them on the Capcom side, that don't seem to fit with the others. Not only that, some of the silliest characters seem to be on high rotation as CPU opponents, so I see them all the time. The game would be significantly improved without the presence of the four Megaman characters, Amingo the Cactus man and SonSon the monkey girl. For that matter, I have to be feeling pretty generous to be happy to see Anakaris, B. B. Hood, Jill Valentine or Ruby Heart show up either.

What I'd have rather seen, frankly, was a Marvel Super Heroes 2 with all of the Marvel characters that this game has (28 of them, although that counts Wolverine and Wolverine (Bone Claws) as two separate characters). They could possibly add full sprites for the "helper" attackers from Marvel vs. Capcom as well (which, if I remember correctly, would add Thor, Jubilee and US Agent to the roster.) Maybe a few other characters could help pad the roster; after all, many of the characters we do have are quite obscure (Blackheart, Shuma-Gorath and Silver Samurai in particular, but Spiral and Marrow are hardly less so. Even more bizarre is that supervillains associated with Daredevil (Blackheart and Silver Samurai) show up but Daredevil does not.) Give us old-fashioned cool backgrounds and music, and that'd be one of my favorite games in the genre. Sadly, it'll never happen. Maybe I could recreate it in MUGEN if I want it that badly. If I ever decide to get into MUGEN. As it is, I'm left feeling that the Capcom adventure with Marvel is a great big mighta-been; what we got was cool enough, but only a fraction of how cool it could have been.

The team-up has also captured my attention, because of course Capcom teamed up with Marvel and with SNK, but never mixed the two; the Capcom characters (specifically the Street Fighter characters, and Morrigan) are the only common denominators. While on vacation recently, I was struck by the concept of a massive fanfiction that combined the Fatal Fury and King of Fighters characters with the Street Fighter and Darkstalkers characters and the Marvel characters... but frankly, I'm already doing that as it is except without the Marvel characters being added to the mix, and it's an intimidating enough concept on its own.