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.

Krizalid

I know I just made another BGM related post, but the Arranged version of the soundtrack for King of Fighters '99 is one of the best video game music CDs that I have (which is good; it took quite a bit of tracking down to find.) And amongst the best music on that soundtrack are the two Krizalid themes. Although the two tracks on the CD are tracked so that they flow seamlessly from one to the other, I haven't been able to find that anyone on youtube has actually merged the two files. I might yet do it myself. In the meantime, here's the two parts of the Krizalid theme. If you listen to them back to back, you'll see what I mean. The first part is "Mechanical Bless", and the second is "My Dear Falling Angel".

Then, for fun, I've included the King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match remake of the song, which is retitled "Cutting Edge."

K'

One of my favorite songs from the King of Fighters series. This is the Original Soundtrack version of the K' team, in the game where they first appear.

Unusually, I actually like this OST version better than the Arranged soundtrack version. Not a huge fan of that artwork, though.

Color select

So... according to videos I've seen on youtube, in King of Fighters XIII, after you select your character, you can select your color from menu that shows you all the available options. You move with the joystick up and down through the selections, and it actually updates your sprite to show you what the color looks like.

Why in the world did it take so long for someone in this genre to think of that?

SF2 clones: Breakers series

Following my generic discussion about SNK, I want to hit on the Breakers series by Visco Games. Although a prototype in a few locations was released to Beta markets called Crystal Legacy in 1994, the real start to the series was in 1996 when Breakers was released. Two years later, in 1998, a slightly tweaked version of the game called Breakers Revenge was released. All on the Neo-Geo platform. Because Breakers Revenge just tweaked some balance issues, added one new character, and made the boss playable, I don't really consider it a "new" game in the series, but rather a polishing off of the same game. The differences between the two are no greater than between Street Fighter II and Street Fighter II: Champion Edition.


The video I've included is probably made available because as a Neo-Geo title, this is easily (and probably frequently) emulated. This is probably the only way the game gets played much, other than the occasional MVS cartridge. Apparently, it never even got an AES release.

While the video will show that this is very much in the vein of Street Fighter 2 in terms of graphics, even to the point of having almost embarrasingly similar character designs, the gameplay has some more nods to an Alpha like gameplay, with super combos being important in the game, and each character having at least two to choose from. What makes the game stand out from others that came out at the same time is the fact that it was painstakingly and very carefully balanced. In fact, to this day, there are still championships held for it in Japan (reportedly) because it has just held up that well. Also because the combo and breakers system is kinda original and fun; not too unlike the concept of the Alpha counters, just implemented a bit better.


In any case, I think it's a little bit unfortunate that this game didn't get a little bit more attention, although it's not at all hard to see why it didn't. Maybe someone could show the title a little TLC on the internet, and make it ping on the radar of genre fans yet.

Although... good luck scoring a copy.

As an aside, there is some embarrasingly bad Engrish in this title, including the character Pierre (who is mispelled Pielle---yes, it is supposed to be Pierre. That's how he appeared in the prototype.) There's still an official site lurking around on the internet, and it's got even more spelling errors; Condor becomes Condol, for instance, and Dao-Long becomes Dao-Rong. Presentation-wise, this lags behind the better efforts of Capcom and SNK, which no doubt contributes to its obscurity. As you can imagine, a game that looks like SF2, except even less visually striking, coming out in 1996 or 1998 (depending on which version you're looking at) couldn't have been very visually exciting either.

Old School Crawl: Street Fighter II

A few nights ago I spent a couple of hours or so with Street Fighter II. The original.

Of course, Street Fighter is the real original, but it didn't make waves like Street Fighter 2 did. Street Fighter 2 is the game that single-handedly created the genre as we know it, and almost everything that followed afterwards did so in its footsteps.



When I was cruising through potential labels for the entire genre, before settling on Karate Supers, I kept coming back to street fighting video games. I didn't use it, because it did sound too much like it just meant the games in this series, but at the same time, that's the long shadow that Street Fighter casts over the genre, and Street Fighter 2 is where it all really happened.

I played three characters all the way through and watched their endings (Ken, Chun-Li and Blanka, for those interested) and played around with a few others, especially Dhalsim, as part of my Old School Crawl review. My first thought when firing up the game was remembering how primitive it all looks in comparison to what followed. The graphics and sound aren't really too much better than the original Street Fighter in many ways. Althought it seemed like a big deal in 1991, the choices of characters (eight) seems really depauperate compared to what we're used to now. The gameplay was slow, and until I got my groove on, it felt floaty and difficult.

Of course, after a round or two, I fell seamlessly back into my groove, and it felt natural again to be playing. I had the timing right to pull off the moves and strategies that I was used to. Moreso than other games that followed later, the original Street Fighter 2 was not nearly as reliant on combos, super or otherwise, nor was it necessarily reliant on special moves. Special moves existed, of course, and were important to playing the game, but regular, basic moves were just as important, and strategies often relied more on predicting AI patterns, at least in single player mode.

Despite the primitiveness, I found that I quite enjoyed revisiting this game. It's still got it. The tweaks that followed in the series and spinoffs that came later didn't necessarily improve it, and in many instances, Capcom tried to recapture the magic that was the original Street Fighter 2.

Nightmare Symbiosis

After thinking that it had completely disappeared from the 'net, I managed to stumble across a web archive version of Nightmare Symbiosis, the best claim I know of for a truly good fanfic based on karate supers. In this case, it's a Street Fighter vs. King of Fighters themed fanfiction.

It does suffer from spending a lot of time on set-up, and then almost slapdashedly finishing the story off, but... it's fanfic. It's still fun to read, and miles above the embarrassingly bad stuff one normally finds.

http://web.archive.org/web/20031203155746/sfvskof.highervoltage.net/intro.php