Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics – wanna take you for a ride (Capcom)
From X-Men: Children Of The Atom to Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, every one of Capcom’s superhero crossover fighters have been remastered with modern online options.
Much has been made about the great run of games Capcom has enjoyed over the last five years. It kicked into top gear with Resident Evil 2 and the subsequent other remakes, leading into Devil May Cry 5, Monster Hunter Rise, Street Fighter 6, and seems set to continue with next year’s Monster Hunter Wilds. It’s an impressive record, but as far back as 2019 Capcom has been making promises about using the opportunity to revive old franchises – but so far they never have.
They’ve certainly remastered a number of older games that we never expected to see again, from Ghost Trick to Mega Man Battle Network, but unless you count Dragon’s Dogma 2 they’ve not really revived anything. That is admittedly a trickier prospect with Marvel Vs. Capcom, since it requires an expensive licence to make work, but in the meantime we’ll happily accept this lovingly crafted compilation.
This contains every arcade-based Marvel game Capcom has ever made (funnily enough, they did produce a coin-op called Avengers in 1987, but it has nothing to do with either Marvel or Emma Peel). That means this omits their surprisingly lacklustre SNES action platformers and does not include anything after Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. That’s seven games in total, all but one of which is a 2D one-on-one fighter, and they’re all varying degrees of fantastic.
Taking the games in chronological order, the first is the odd-one-out of the collection: scrolling beat ‘em-up The Punisher, from 1993. We vaguely remember seeing this one in arcades, back in the day, but the Marvel character most known for using guns seems an odd choice for a beat ‘em-up, especially pairing him up with the pre-Samuel L. Jackson version of Nick Fury.
He does use a gun, but he only pulls it out if other enemies are using theirs, which seems more like the Predator than the Punisher. Even so, this is a fun example of the genre and a great little bonus for the compilation.
It’s a shame it hasn’t got an online mode like the other games, but it still has its own museum section and a great CRT filter, that makes the screen look like a 90s TV monitor. We’re very happy to see that instead of the ugly smoothing options that are usually the default in these kind of compilations – although the option does exist if you want it.
As fun as it is, The Punisher looks and plays like a Final Fight spin-off, and with their next arcade game Capcom decided to go a completely different route, with one-on-one fighter X-Men: Children Of The Atom. This isn’t just Street Fighter 2 with different graphics, as it plays at a noticeably faster pace and has an emphasis on …read more
Source:: Metro
