Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics

Today saw the physical release of Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics. The game debuted digitally in September, but now Capcom diehards can take seven arcade classics home in tangible form (with a bonus mini comic book to boot). The value of this collection is immediately obvious, as buying the six versus fighters alone in their PlayStation, Dreamcast, or Xbox iterations would cost something like $200 per disc. Moreover, The Punisher, the lone beat-em-up rounding out the collection, hadn't seen a home release to this point, rendering the value of the collection inestimable. But how do the fighting games hold up today, especially when compared against their prior home versions?

X-Men: Children of the Atom marks the first Marvel fighting game made by Capcom, and it is essentially a straight-up Street Fighter clone, albeit with super-jumps. Your correspondent played this game last night on PS1 on a CRT TV and must attest that the resolution is impressive on that game. In this current edition, Children of the Atom looks overly pixelated, no matter which of the eight available display filters you choose to run it with. Accordingly, the game looks better on PS1. Also like the PS1, this new edition of Children of the Atom does not spare on difficulty level, presumably putting it in fidelity with the arcade edition.

Marvel Super Heroes delivers as advertised in terms of roster, placing your standard Jack Kirby classics alongside a smattering of X-Men. Your correspondent also played this game last night on a PS1 connected to a CRT TV and must again report that the resolution is clearer and better-looking on that earlier version than on the present. Also, your correspondent was able to beat that PS1 version of Marvel Super Heroes using only a few continues on the default difficulty. That was not the case with the current version, which maintains an arcade-level difficulty. That said, the PS1 version of Marvel Super Heroes plays as if submerged in an ocean, demonstrating considerable lag and slowdown. This has been rectified in the current version, which runs as smooth as Silk Spectre (who is, unfortunately, not in the game).

Marvel Super Heroes sans filter.

X-Men vs. Street Fighter brings Ryu, Ken, and friends into the fray against the X-Men in tag-team crossover action. Arcade games were meant to swallow your quarters, and this game follows in that mold. You'll be facing a stiff challenge as soon as you advance to the second pair of computer-controlled opponents.

Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter brings the entire Marvel cast in to face the Street Fighter pantheon. In the present version of this game, you'll once again be in for a real fight against the second pair of CPU challengers.

Marvel vs. Capcom is really what the prior two games were building toward. Now you have a host of beloved Capcom licensed characters in the mix, such as Strider and Mega Man. Again, the action is far more pixelated than the smooth display on CRT TVs running the PS1 and Dreamcast versions of the game. Your correspondent played both of those earlier versions in the prior weeks, and he was able to get to the final boss on the PS1 version using no continues on the default difficulty (though he eventually gave up trying to beat the pesky Onslaught after double-digit losses). This was not the case with the present version of Marvel vs. Capcom, which displays an arcade-level difficulty early on. Of course, that PS1 version does not allow tagging but instead has a watered-down assist system. Thus, the present version presents a major upgrade for home console gamers.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 improves mightily upon its predecessor, which was already exceedingly good. The sequel boasts almost 60 selectable characters, pitting them against one another in screen-melting 3-on-3 battles. The graphics look fantastic in this present version, with filter and pixelation presenting no issues. The default difficulty, meanwhile, is challenging, but not nearly as prohibitive as the aforementioned games in the collection, meaning you'll be able to make it past the first two opposing trios with ease. One downside to the collection as a whole is that once you get into the swing of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, it's hard to go back to the earlier games. Nonetheless, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is worth the cost of the collection by itself. 

The Punisher stands as the highlight of this collection, your correspondent is truly surprised to say. Although it could be consigned to afterthought status, as the lone beat-em-up on this collection, The Punisher is anything but. The Punisher delivers a high-gear, nigh R-rated imagining of Final Fight. Playing as the lone vigilante or teaming with Nick Fury, you exact hard vengeance on Kingpin's assemblage of toughs and cyborgs via knives, pipes, axes, handguns, and AR-styled firearms, as well as your fists and feet. Dealing out this brand of rapid-fire retribution results in a deeply satisfying gaming experience, and so The Punisher prevails as one of the best beat-em-ups your correspondent has ever played.

The Punisher wields a hammer worthy of Thor

All told, The Punisher and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 make Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics a must-buy title. Though the other five games suffer a bit from inexorably pixelated graphics and uninviting difficulty levels, they still represent important nodes in the evolution of the creative partnership between Marvel and Capcom, and are worth trying out. There's limitless replay value for all these games in multiplayer, both local and online. And if you buy the Switch version, you can play online multiplayer wherever you can get Wi-Fi. All this is rather incredible, seeing how at the dawn of 2024, most of us had made peace with the presumption that the Marvel vs. Capcom games would forever be confined to unaffordability. Both of the eponymous companies deserve praise for realizing this marvelous capstone to their collaborations. 

Capcom Classics Collection

Compilation discs may evoke skepticism in the shrewd game-buyer, and with good cause. Such retrospectives are a dime a dozen and, in essence, rehashes, advertising a plurality of games from bygone eras, many of which are sheer rubbish. And with the Capcom Classics Collection (the first of two volumes for the PS2) there is indeed dross—top-down shooters like Vulgus, for instance, that have not aged favorably. But with that being said, the first of the Capcom Classics Collections is still eminently purchasable. In this essay, your correspondent will argue as much on account of Final Fight, Forgotten Worlds, and the plurality Street Fighter II iterations appearing on the disc.

We begin with the Street Fighters. Capcom Classics Collection (vol. 1) contains Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991) and its updates Street Fighter II: Champion Edition (1992), and Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting (1992). There is, as one would expect with the Street Fighter titles, only a hair's breadth difference between the games, particularly the latter two. And indeed, we’ve seen these versions re-released before. However, on this compilation, the PS2's analog stick is a blessing, ensuring that the games play with high fidelity vis-a-vis their arcade versions, and certainly much better than the SNES and Genesis console versions of the 1990s. This disc's Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, in fact, is a much better translation than the stiff and pixelated port that appears on the SNES Classic, the control of which suffers from the comparably rigid Super Nintendo D-Pad. As a bonus, beating all three Street Fighter II games on Capcom Classics Collection opens up a fourth, of sorts, entitled "Deluxe Versus Mode". This mode allows two human opponents to compete against each other with a sampling of characters from all three installments of Street Fighter II series included on the disc. Essentially, Deluxe Versus Mode allows for matchups of fighting styles and costumes that couldn't otherwise be done on any previous game, which should be enough to warrant a purchase for Street Fighter diehards.

The inclusion of 1989's Final Fight, the famed arcade and multiplatform beat-em-up, renders the Capcom Classics Collection even more buyable. The game is, fundamentally, a side-scrolling Street Fighter, allowing the gamer to choose from a street brawler (Cody), karate guy (Guy) or pro wrestler/civic politician (Haggar) and then embark upon a series of hundreds of mini one-on-one (or one-on-two or one-on-three) showdowns; indeed, the boss battles are more formalized fights in the Capcom style. In fact, the first takes place in a wrestling ring against the unfortunately named Sodom—soon-to-be Street Fighter Alpha Samurai—for a no-holds-barred weapons match. The next takes place in a cage against “Andore”, a none-too-subtle Andre the Giant clone. In short, Final Fight's sensibilities are as much pro-wrestling as they are Street Fighter. You can turn these showdowns into handicap matches by enlisting friends, as Final Fight is of course, in the style of the Double Dragon which it was cloning, best enjoyed as a multiplayer game. Certainly, teaming up with a  friend makes dispatching the waves of antagonists much easier. In terms of difficulty, Capcom was gracious enough to afford the player(s) infinite continues in this version, a luxury one did not have on the arcade and Super NES releases. With this merciful concession, now everyone is able to enjoy the game from start to finish—even the not-so-quick of thumb—and so proceeding through Final Fight becomes akin to watching a movie or playing a vinyl, albeit one with which players can actually interact. And while Final Fight may not have the artistry of even a mediocre movie or album, its conclusion is not altogether non-compelling. After button-mashing your way through six levels of cityscapes and subways infested with hoods, hookers and transgender delinquents, the eponymous finishing battle puts you up against a crime-boss named Belger, who weaves all about the screen in his motorized wheelchair, leggy blond in tow. If there had ever been a Final Fight movie, Belger would have been played by Sid Haig. In that way, among others, beating Final Fight is kind of like playing through a B-movie. And, true to the (mean) spirit of most B-movies, you'll feel a certain satisfaction when you reach the game's climax—kicking the wheelchair-bound villain out of a top-floor window.

The third reason for buying the Capcom Classics Collection is 1988's Forgotten Worlds, a game that, contra the modifier in its title, should not be disremembered. This side-scrolling shooter casts you (or you and a friend) into the role of airborne super-soldier with a punk rock haircut and a massive weapon. The screen scrolls slowly, and you can move anywhere on it, all the while shooting in 360 degrees. This feature was quite revolutionary for the time, and affords the player a sense of freedom not found in the majority of elderly games. Kudos to Capcom for delegating this ability to the right analog stick, making rotational shooting silky smooth. As you proceed through wave after wave of flying lizard men and other idiosyncratic baddies, you can collect "zenny" (Capcom's early in-house currency) to periodically purchase weapon upgrades from a shopkeep named Sylphie (whose name says it all, as the gamin blonde is certainly sylphlike.) What makes Forgotten Worlds so unforgettable is its hard-to-place aesthetic. The titular worlds consigned to oblivion seem to have been drawn with reference to the visual cultures of cyberpunk and orientalism, making for an art style that is a bricolage of sci-fi and fantasy, the latter both apocalyptic and intercultural. With the preponderance of Ancient Egyptian motifs, we might venture to label the visual style as "Scarab punk". The villains include dragons and mechanical arthropods, as well as an Egyptian-themed Galactus clone, and even an icicle man who looks like the original PlayStation mascot (and eventual PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale boss). The player will also face-off with a giant zombie head—not unlike Bub from Day of the Dead—half-submerged at screen's bottom. In short, the aesthetic is eclectic. And sonically speaking, the soundtrack crawls on tarantula legs, technocratic and febrile, tinny and tinctured with downbeat valor. In sum, Forgotten Worlds is an action-packed, incomparably surreal tour through an uncannily memorable fantasy hellscape.

On account of the Street Fighters, Final Fight, and Forgotten Worlds, Capcom Classics Collection is a solid purchase that won't be regretted. If the aforementioned games aren't enough to convince the reader, consider that the disc also contains Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Super Ghouls'n Ghosts, the inclusion of which would most certainly justify a purchase for those masochist fans who like their games ultra-hard. Also, the WWII shooters 1942 and 1943 are on there, too, if that's your mise-en-scene. In sum, if you've felt any inkling for any Capcom game at any point in time, there's probably something on the Capcom Classics Collection disc warranting a purchase.