X-Men vs. Street Fighter - Arcade

ICONIC APPROACH, MUCH TITLE!

It's the crossover nobody asked for and yet nearly everyone welcomes with its loud, proud, almost flamboyant use of colour, speed and graphic clarity, it's X-Men Vs. Street Fighter. Taking a medley of X-men characters ranging from The Juggernaut (bitch!), Wolverine, Storm, Rogue, Cyclops, Gambit, Sabertooth and more. While also throwing in various Street Fighter characters as Ryu, Ken (Seriously, what self-respecting Street Fighter doesn't have these two... oh wait... THAT one...), Chun-Li, Bison, Charlie, Akuma (secret but easy to find), Dhalsim and more, ranking up a total of 8 from each franchise and pitting 2-on-2 battles using a tag-team system.

Could be a bit of a match up here, in theory entirely unbalanced, as a game, fight time!

Taking the usual battle system found in many other Capcom titles, X-Men Vs. Street Fighter uses the 6-button layout for combat. Meaning it has a set of punches and a set of kicks ranging from weak to medium and strong/fierce giving you 6 buttons for attack. Throw in the joystick for movement and pulling off special moves and you're sitting pretty for some fairly intense action ranging from fireballs to combos, aerial attacks and launchers, high jumps and teleportation with also the option to switch out your player for the other partner by pressing both strong attacks at the same time, letting the partner that's out of the fight regain some health.

And the hits keep piling up!

What's interesting for X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, is that there's hyper moves, the energy for which builds up over time either by being struck or hitting the other player, or pulling off special moves and for each bar that's completed, gives the player the change to use a much more powerful, usually devastating, hyper move that usually involves doing a special move and hitting more than one attack button of the same type i.e. two punch buttons rather than one. Often causing a large steady, multi-hitting beam move, or an uninterruptable combo if the first strike lands. If you can mix-combo these into a standard combo, you're pretty much laughing at your opponent.

Ahhhh.... Viennaaaaa....

Battles in X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, take place along a myriad of locations, ranging from a shopping mall, the back of a blackbird (the plane, not the small creature, though that would be fascinating to see for about 2 seconds), a gas storage plant, a backstreet surrounded by police, a TV show and several others, all which have a lavish level of detail within and often have a few hidden extras in the background, like one level showing Blanka and Beast in the background, while other levels will change based upon either the time taken in the fight or depending upon which round of combat you're in. It adds to a little extra variation we're not normally used to seeing.

Flashy Special Elite Alpha Finish! (Mk 3, upper)

The music in X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, changes depending upon the players being swapped in and out. When a player is defeated, the next player to join the battle usually has their theme tune ringing out from previous games (namely Street Fighter Alphas and X-Men: Children of the Atom) adding to an odd but welcome mix of audio. Every hit, impact and strike sounds like lightning and thunder going off and power moves often sound as powerful as they are destructive to the other players health bars (and your own, often your own). While the graphics are fast, fluid, looking like comics/cartoons in appearance which can be a little jarring to some of the more realistic backgrounds but everything looks how it should and plays steadily.

As if I'd leave out a Raging Demon move...

With a final boss that is worthy of the X-Men franchise (and reused from an earlier game) taking up over a whole screen and with some incredibly cheap moves (it IS the final boss...) there's a lot in this game that will bring fans back for more. Though people that don't appreciate or like this genre of game might want to give it a few cursory goes, but would do better watching the more capable players for what the game is really able to showcase.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs - Arcade

Not the most exciting start image, I know.

It's not the first amalgamation I'd consider if someone said "Put two things together and make a game with it from an original comic book" and while I might have chosen Dinosaurs, because they're dinosaurs after all, it's unlikely I'd have chosen Cadillacs. Likely I'd have opted for Dragons and Dungeons... no wait...

Odd when the language doesn't match the threat.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs started originally as a comic book series in the late 80's, set in post-apocalyptic world where pollution and disasters ransacked the planet, people moved underground for centuries and when they came back to the surface, dinosaurs were around again. Our two main protagonists, Jack and Hannah, fix cars and science dinosaurs respectively while trying to survive in a world where driving down to the corner-shop is likely to get your head chomped by something large and scaly. (Not using a mom joke there...)

I get to punch out T-Rex looking things, awesome.

From this, in steps Capcom to publish Cadillacs and Dinosaurs as a brawl-em-up. Take your two main chars, add in a few extra minor chars, give them some pointless stats details and have them punch, kick and fight their way through multiple enemies, levels, bosses of both human and dinosaur in nature, and some enemies that are a little of both. The special skills are laughable at best, "Good Skill", "Items", "A move everyone else already has" and "Useless" are pretty much the spectrum on that one.

I don't get the appeal of driving a Caddy, but I do get the appeal of running mooks down.

In so far as a plot is concerned, our intrepid heroes embark on a journey to stop poachers from killing dinosaurs and selling the skins, get ambushed on the way home and find out it was a ploy by some nutcase in a lab coat who wishes to fuse humans and dinosaurs together through 'Science' and become the perfect being. Sadly this was doomed from the start as he never wished to become me, oh how fickle life is. Cue this as a reason to fight your way through multiple levels featuring bosses, returning bosses, dual bosses, transformation bosses, bosses that become standard enemies and effectively hitting all the usual feature one might find in the arcade gaming tropes section. Even the obligatory sewer level and elevator level turn up.

No, no mix tapes were dropped here, someone started this fire.

You're not alone in Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (Of which the Caddy rarely turns up but thankfully the dinosaurs do) you've a wealth of weapons to help you ranging from pistols to shotguns, clubs, rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, dynamite and knives with the usual smattering of arcade brawling food items and points items to help push you up onto the bonus lives limits. Depending upon the machine you're playing on, you can have 2-3 players on screen at once trying to work out which dinosaurs are nice/nasty and which enemy is about to hit you before your mates screw it up and take you down by accident.

"Parts to include in beat-em-ups, #12 A boss rush of previous bosses: Check"

I can't say that I know of the source comics or the cartoon series (which may or may not have come out after the game anyway) but as a game, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs shows that the motion and controls are fluid and quite responsive. Running is done easily with a double tap in a direction, jumping and fighting is pulled off easily while the use of weapons and items comes fairly intuitively. There's little difference between the main characters in choice of skills and abilities, they all have combos, they call can run and jump and attack, they all have the "2 button" desperation attack that floors everything around themselves and costs a small amount of health in the process.

"Parts to include in beat-em-ups, #8 Elevator/Lift/Funicular sections: Check"

Graphically everything looks ok, though there's a little chuckle to oneself when you see the Twin Towers stood next to some new-age Mesopotamian Pyramid, maybe they rebuilt it. The levels don't seem to have the same attention to detail one might expect from Capcom and the detail on the standard enemies is somewhat lacking for quite a few of them, however the focus on the dinosaurs and dino-related creatures is sublime and there's a guilty pleasure in punching out a T-Rex type dinosaur while body slamming a boss into several standard enemies.

Thankfully, that IS his final form.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs also delivers on the sounds, solid and loud explosions, synthed voices punctuating screams and shouts of triumph and jubilation as well as a rather overly enthusiastic "GO" sign that pops up when you need to progress to the right for more fighting. The music however doesn't seem to have been considered suitably for the project in that you can go from 20 seconds of intense rooftop fighting, to a jazzy number in a chaotic hallway before going back outside to a epic, adrenaline inducing rush of music before the boss turns up and it becomes a lower key tune that doesn't have the same rush. It gives the impression that whoever assigned the music didn't have the same ideas as the person that composed it.

STFU! I've got more credits!

Sadly for an arcade game, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs doesn't have much of a replay factor. Once you've beaten it you might give it another go and use another character but there's little deviation from the standard play here. Even before you've beaten it, chances are you've seen everything already and there's little reason to come back and go through it again. Which is a shame as it's quite the fun game to play.

Die Hard Arcade - Arcade, in case you hadn't guessed!

Who has bigger billing here? Fox, or Sega? There's only one way to find out, FIGHT!

Normally, one associates a game based on a film to be utter dross. A steaming pile of Atari E.T. Or worse. I could look back over a lot of Movie to Game adaptations and wonder aloud the immortal phrase "What the hell were they thinking?" while recanting various hashes and screw ups over the years from the Atari 2600 onwards, through the NES and SNES days, 8-bit, 16-bit and beyond. But as with all things involving large statistical data sets, eventually you'll come across outliers and extremes at that. Die Hard Arcade isn't quite one of those extremes but it's quite close to it.

The hardest fight in the game, this guy doesn't wash his hands before trying to punch you.

For those not the know, Die Hard is a film. Go watch it, now. When you're done come back and you'll understand the plot of this game almost flawlessly. For those who've already seen it and those that haven't done as they were told, I'll recap briefly the game anyway. Terrorists invade skyscraper, president's daughter is amongst hostages, you're sent in to infiltrate and rescue. Shit goes down, stuff gets blown up and you're left alone (maybe with a 2nd player, it's possible) to fight your way through the game and engage in a few Quick Time Events. Yes this game predates Shenmue, but so do a lot of others.

Given the time, it's not a bad attempt at recreating the film in limited polygons.

What do we have though with Die Hard Arcade? We've a multitude of levels and arenas in which our protagonists steadily get less and less dressed for the occasion in keeping with the idea of the not having any shoes etc, while punching, kicking, combo-ing and blowing up gangsters, crooks, ninjas, fat people, crooked cops and bent fire-fighters with the occasional big robot (yes I know...) and a few VERY large men here and there before fighting the boss, twice.

Hilarious, the boss can't find the child, it's like some whacky slapstick comedy show!

It plays quickly and the transition between one area and another is done smoothly as you watch the characters physically running down corridors wherein your Quick Time Event will take place, either jumping, punching, or kicking as required in order to incapacitate the enemy, otherwise you're going to have to fight a particularly tougher battle than normal. Almost a real credit eater in fact. Each area has its own features, some will have fans that hurt if you walk into them, a radar dish that moves quickly back and forth, weapons and items to use in combat, a fire engine spraying water like it's cannon time at the local riots and so on and so forth. Giving a mixed feel to each area and keeping things a little more fresh and different as they go.

QTEs, win them and kill an enemy outright, lose them and either get hurt or fight some tough characters.

There's a lot of variation even within the combat for Die Hard Arcade, multiple different combos and attacks to perform including back attacks, charged attacks, jumps, holds and combos, holds and throws, holds and combos INTO throws. *take a breath* pistols, machineguns, Anti Tank rifles (stolen from the terrorists I assume), pepper spray (works on masked people too), poles, sticks, brooms, robot arms, rocket launchers, chairs, boxes, barrels and even some health pickups of different strengths. Speaking of which, with pistols you can arrest enemies and take them straight out of the game if you get to grapple them while holding the pistol, a very nice touch indeed! Though if you run out of ammo, you throw the gun, which can cause damage too and is one truly hilarious way of ending a fight.

I don't remember this being in the film...

The music isn't all that memorable but it does play second fiddle to a wealth of explosions and fisticuffs, voices of enemies begging for mercy before trying to sucker punch/kick you, over the top hammy voice acting during cut scenes (always welcome) and a healthy compilation of gunshots, laser blasts (see robots for explanation) and water impacts during various traps and locales. Though the arcade itself can be customised to lower the noise setting, you likely won't hear the music over the sound effects and fighting anyway.

Paid poorly, the window cleaning robots go on the rampage, with lasers...

Despite the linear approach to the game, there's some replay factor in this in that it's just very entertaining and if you've got two players and get through to win the game, you go back to the Double Dragon method of winning in that victory becomes a fight to the death between Player 1 and Player 2. It's a bright and colourful game with enough tongue-in-cheek humour at the source material to be entertaining enough and steadily paced to bring back players for another go at the game. Not quite a long term play but worth a few run-throughs all the same.