Marvel VS Capcom 2
Anyone who saw my original post about the MvC2 PSN demo knows how excited I was for this game (see below). I won’t repeat myself, but the demo was very sparse and with the full game out, a review of the full game needs to be completed.
The full version launched on PSN and XBLA for $15/1200 MS Points, and is a pretty faithful port of the game. Included are your standard Arcade, VS and Online modes.
One thing I couldn’t get across in my original post is how f-ing crazy this game is. For a fighting game there is more going on than any other game and it’s insane what you have at your disposal. Just to quickly go through the mechanics again, each character has a light and strong punch, light and strong kick, and a series of special moves. They can also tag out for another fighter on their team, or just call in one or both of there team mates for a quick assist attack. This can also be done for super moves, so if your power bar is level 3 or higher (it can go to 5) you can do your super as well as the super move for your other characters all at the same time. Also you leap up in the air above the field for some insane area combos. Finally you also have an attack to temporarily knock your opponent out of the area and force them to switch characters.
While not in use you characters will recover a small bit of lost health so it’s good to keep an eye on those health bars for an ideal time to tag out. Also if your opponent calls in their assist characters for an attack, you can hit them as well. It’s common to nearly destroy a character that hasn’t even really joined the match.
All this makes for the most insane and hectic gameplay around. However it’s not without it faults. With all these abilities, the game becomes crazily unbalanced. With 60 characters and all kinds of different attacks, it would be impossible to make this a balanced game. The original versions weren’t, and there’s no way they are going to mess with anything for this quick port. This isn’t such a big deal for local play or single player, but if you’re going to play online chances are you’ll get smoked by someone who knows an infinite combo or some really cheap tricks. You’ll know which characters to avoid eventually, but it still won’t help you win.
Aside from the balancing issues online play works really well, and you shouldn’t have many problems finding or creating matches. Which is a benefit, as most fighting games have serious online problems.
Back to the single player mode, first thing you’ll want to do is increase the time limit. I find that without that (on damage level 2), the majority of my fights end with a time over. You can also increase the damage level, to make the fights go faster (which I did to fit more fights in the video above).
The single player mode has you complete 7 stages of 3 on 3 fights. Then the huge awesome boss that Capcom vs. games are known for. He can be cheap, but fun nonetheless.
All 60 characters in the game are unlocked right off the bat. This is a WICKED approach for local and online play, and more games need to do this. But I have to admit that earning points from the single player game and unlocking new characters was really fun in the old versions (even the arcade had unlocks), which is great with such a huge and varied roster. So part of me wishes that was still in the single player mode to provide some more goals there, but I guess the trophies/achievements fill that gap.
All in all, this is a fighting game I think everyone can experience and enjoy.
Original Review of the PSN Demo from May 1, 2009.
This has been a month of miracles. For those of you who haven’t been keeping up, over the last couple weeks we’ve had two huge announcements that gamers thought they would never see.
First, last week Final Fantasy 7 International Version was released on the JPN and HK PSN stores for roughly $15 US. This is huge as gamers who missed out on this game the first time around have been begging for some sort of re-release or remake, and no one believed it would happen this soon. If anything I would have expected Square-Enix to throw it on a disc and charge nearly full price for it. Everyone would complain, but they’d still end up paying, as it would be cheaper than the $90+ that the original FF7 is going for on eBay.
But this review isn’t about Final Fantasy VII, this is about an equally loved and rare game known as Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
To me Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was the last big hurrah for Arcades. It came out around that time when every arcade was closing down and was incredibly popular. It was the first game in the vs. series to feature 3 on 3 fights and had an impressive roster of both Marvel and Capcom characters. It was also the very last game released by Capcom before losing the video game rights to the Marvel characters.
For the uninitiated, the Marvel Vs Capcom series was born from Capcoms Marvel fighting games. These games include X-Men Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes and later Street Fighter VS X-Men and Marvel Super Heroes VS Street Fighter. These games were 2d fighters featuring marvel characters and were quite a departure from the typical street fighter style. Although moves were preformed in the same fashion the game was much less of a strategic fighter and much more balls to the wall action extravaganza. Players had support characters that could be called in, there were several types of super moves (most of which filled up nearly the entire screen), and all the attacks were bigger and badder than a typical 2d fighter.
MvC2 was also released on the Sega Dreamcast, and just before Capcoms license to use the characters expired the game was ported to Xbox and PS2. The ports didn’t run as well as the original DC version, and because of the small print run became quite difficult to find. The game typically goes for $70 for the DC, $100 for the Xbox, and $120 for the PS2.
While fans demanded a sequel or re-release in the years that followed, it seem unlikely as Activsion now held the rights to the Marvel universe. Over the past year however both spokesmen at Marvel and Capcom have stated that they understood the fans wanted more MvC and talks were underway.
It wasn’t until just this past week that the good news finally broke. Marvel VS Capcom 2 is to be released this summer, complete with online play. It would be available as a download on both PSN and XBLA. A PSN exclusive demo was available on April 30th, and that’s what we’re playing now!
First off the demo plays quite smoothly. It’s much more reminiscent of the DC version of the game and doesn’t seem to suffer the same frame rate issues of the Xbox or PS2 versions.
I was curious to see how they we’re going to pull off a demo for this game. Typically there aren’t many demo’s for fighters and the ones we do get usually let you play one or two matches with one or two players.
This demo only allowed for human vs. human matches. If you don’t have a friend nearby to play with, you’re outta luck. Sure you could turn on controller 2 and beat up an non moving opponent, but that gets old fast.
Being a 3 on 3 fighter, they were at least nice enough to give you 6 (of the total 56) characters to use. These include Ryu, Chun-Li and Strider from the Cacpom properties and Spider Man, Iron Man, and Wolverine from Marvel. At first the controls feel a bit loose. I blame Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix and Street Fighter 4 for that feeling though. It takes almost no time to get the hang of things again.
Those who are only familiar with the earlier games in the series or other Capcom fighter’s, should note that this game uses a 4 button control scheme instead of the typical 6. With only 2 punch and 2 kick buttons this control scheme translated better to the PS3 controller than games like SF4 which really require a arcade stick to play comfortably.
The game does suffer from the usually graphically from the usual problem of trying to make old sprite based games HD compatible. Anyone who’s played any of the recent re-releases / up conversions will be used to this, but new comers will definitely complain about the graphics.
The backgrounds and menus look great in HD, but like other conversions the character sprites look terrible. There are several filters you can select to try and have nicer looking sprites, but in the end you’re really just choosing between pixilated or blurry.
All in all though this looks like it’ll be a great port. If you can get over the crappy looking sprites you’ll be treated to an amazing 2D fighting experience. If you’ve played the game before there’s not much reason to pick up the demo, but if you haven’t you should download it to see what you’re missing out on…. Just make sure you have a friend over to actually play it with you.
Like this game? Order it online
