MARVEL vs. CAPCOM Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics – A golden era of Marvel, long before Iron Man

MARVEL vs. CAPCOM Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, that rolls right off the tongue. Instead, how about “Tournament Fighting, Awesome AF!” Short, concise and to the point. Normally when you see Marvel somewhere you tend to run, but this comes from a different time. One when all the Marvel films were also terrible, but the games were phenomenal. And here there are seven of them, each better than the next. If you like tournament brawlers, otherwise the selection is thinner.

1993 – The Punisher

The outlier of the round and probably intended as a bonus, but one that packs a punch. Back then, The Punisher made its appearance as a beating-walking game in the style of the Turtles or Simpsons or Aliens or AD&D or whatever else Capcom could get its hands on to let the beating move from left to right. The Punisher wasn’t an arcade quickie either, but rather one of the most successful machines of this year. Sure, it’s no Streets of Rage 2 or Turtles Arcade, but there’s a lot of fighting fun here, especially with a friend, for one to three bottles of beer. At that time, Capcom just figured out that it felt good when one comic character punched another.

1994 – X-Men: Children of the Atom

You only know the inferior Playstation version that came out years after the arcade? Forget them, you’ve never seen how good X-Men: Children of the Atom can be. In terms of gameplay, you have a cast of a dozen of the most popular X-Men at the time – this was all years before the first film and the X-Men becoming mainstream – and Akuma as a bonus. It plays very similarly to Super Street Fighter II Turbo and that’s certainly not a bad thing, quite the opposite. Add a few tweaks to the super combos and you have a game that today seems stripped down in terms of mechanics and characters, but if it still feels so damn good to play, then I couldn’t care less.

1995 – Marvel Super Heroes

Again, if you played this on Saturn or Playstation then you haven’t experienced it, even if the versions are better than Children of the Atom. But the arcade version has such fantastic animations and joy of color that your heart will swell with every fight. The game mechanics are of course still very much based on its predecessor and thus Street Fighter, but supplements this with the Infinity Stones, which are much more famous today than they were back then. You get these for special moves in vs. or arcade mode and they briefly give you special moves and skills. Add to that the Infinity combos and you have an almost perfect arcade brawler. You will hear the last sentence here more often.

1996 – X-Men vs. Street Fighter

How can we make all of this even better? Well, by throwing the best brawling game ever into the mix. To say that at the time people were skeptical about whether Street Fighter’s perfection at the time would not be diluted by X-Men characters would be putting it mildly. But we should have trusted Capcom right away. They stitched the two combo and special styles together seamlessly, with the fundamentals based on the two superhero moves. Aerial combos are here, as are the super jumps. The tag system has been refined and hyper and variable combos can be executed precisely. When you see the perfection of the animations and the precision with which it all happens, you wonder how crazy we were back then that we even put a single mark into Mortal Kombat. This plays so much better than even MK3. And certainly better than the Playstation version of X-Men vs. Street Fighter back in the day. Why didn’t Capcom just give up on delivering these inferior ports? Oh, yes, money. I forgot. And they needed that for…

1997 – Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter

Why bother with the X-Men when you can have Spider-Man, Hulk or Captain America. Or Blackheart, US Agent or Shuma-Gorath? Who are these guys? It’s funny to see who made the cut to become popular today through the movies and who had to stay in the comics and arcade. A dozen fighters from Marvel, a dozen from Street Fighter, the roster gets bigger, the tag mechanics are further refined and the variable assists become a definitive defining element of the series.

Finding the right combination of two characters that complement each other perfectly is a bit of a science if you want it to be. Or you can still enjoy the brilliant playing feeling. And yes, I admit, if I had had to spend 120+ marks every year on an inferior implementation of this back then, I might have longed for more variety. But here in arcade perfection and in an inexpensive collection, I don’t ask any questions, but still carry on with the joy of playing…

1998 – Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes

Today it is strange to see that War Machine is included in the ten Marvel heroes, but not Iron Man. Nobody cared at the time, Robert Downey Jr. was still ten years away. In the US, the game was ahead of Street Fighter 3 in arcade sales, and it’s debatable whether that’s true. I would prefer SF3, but then again I wouldn’t knock MvC: CoSH off the edge of the bed. More like asking if they’re interested in a threesome, unless of course it’s the Playstation version. But all was not lost at home, the best console ever, the Dreamcast was here and here all was right with the world for a golden year or so.

Of course there is tag team again with the now just over 20 characters, with the character not in the game regaining a little energy. In order to provide a little innovation, the Variable Assist system is removed and the Guest system is included. You will be randomly assigned a guest before a match and can use them to launch an attack. The duo attack is also new, in which both tag partners attack the opponent at the same time. All of this plays fantastically, except of course on the Playstation, where there weren’t even tag teams. Amazing it even started. Luckily this misery came to an end when the next game was released:

2000 – Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes

Because Ddei are better than two, you now choose three characters for your tag team. Well, Capcom could have realized that before, it was okay at the time to copy SNK, because King of Fighters showed for the umpteenth time that three-man tag teams were cool. The variable system is back and with three fighters on the team there is no longer any need for guests. And if you don’t have a need for the current opponent in the ring, then in MvC2: NAoH you can perform snapbacks to throw him out of the ring and force another fighter from the opposing team in. Anyone who flies out of there and comes in is in for a treat, because this time Capcom went all out and gives you the choice of over 50 fighters. No wonder this part is still considered the highlight of the series and two minutes of playing are enough to accept this as the absolute truth.

Sure, that was a lot of praise, but I’m totally serious. Each of these games is phenomenally good in its own right, some of the best 2D brawlers you can play beyond Street Fighter or Darkstalkers. They represent the golden age of 2D tournament brawlers to perfection and it’s not hard to see how they held up against the Tekken and Soul Edge/Caliburs. If the flow of the game is so brilliantly designed, hits and specials just feel right and flow elegantly from the pad, then nobody in the genre needs polygons. The comic look is timelessly beautiful and I won’t let anything get in the way of these games!

Except perhaps the question of whether you really need them all now… Of course, going through the development of the games from the rather slow Children of the Atom to the much more hectic but complex MvC2 game by game has its charm, just as every title has its charm, but you have to want to pay homage to the genre to really enjoy this. Sure, that also applies to the SF Collection. At least the Punisher loosens things up a bit and the games differ significantly more due to the mix of characters from basically two worlds. In this respect, I would say that nothing comes close to Street Fighter per se, but as a collection I find this one more exciting.

In any case, there is nothing to complain about in terms of implementation. Of course, all are the arcade versions, no Playstation traumas here and you can choose between US and Japan for each game. There are always move lists, training modes, a general save function for whenever you need it and a range of on-screen filters and options. Luckily there is also a subtle CRT, which fits. Each game offers online modes with clean rollback netcode and plays flawlessly. Rarely have I been put together as fluidly and professionally as I did here. Beginners will find options such as one-button combos for all offline modes just for fun and of course a museum with over 500 images cannot be missed. Even more important: You can now play “Take You For A Ride” non-stop. Sure, there are over 200 other tracks from all the games here, which are some of the best that this era of gaming produced acoustically, but Take You For A Ride is the catchy tune par excellence. If there was no timer, no one would have ever left MvC2’s character select.

So yes, after Castlevania, the second practically perfect retro collection this week. And yes, as much as I love Street Fighter, today I have to give preference to the Marvels here, as the game systems had already developed further than was sometimes the case even in SF3. SF2 was the big bang, but a lot happened in the next few years and you can admire it here. While SF tends to evolve over decades, the ’90s were a hectic phase in which there had to be something new in the arcade every year. The competition at the time was brutal, especially when 3D was added, and even in-house nothing was given to you for free. In this “survival of the fittest” environment, the Marvel-Capcom games have always managed to secure a place at the top, and today it’s not hard to see why that was the case. Each of these games still plays exceptionally well. Of course not every balance is perfect, each title has its little quirks and peculiarities, but that’s part of the genre. If you want to give the genre a chance, you can’t do better than this collection. And if you’ve been proudly wearing the “Take You For A Ride” tattoo since 2000, then you’re already playing.