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.

Street Fighter 2 (SNES)

"The Country Warrior" just confused a lot of people.

At a time where consoles and home computers were catching up to the arcades in terms of quality and performance, some games matched their arcade counterparts (in a fashion) while other games were mere shadows of their arcade counterparts. However when Street Fighter 2 hit the arcades, its resounding success was touted to be ported onto the Super Nintendo and as a boxed bundle, likely doing almost as much for the console as the fat plumber did in the first place. What people got, was a near-perfect replication of the game people had pumped credits into for a long time and finally a machine that showed it could almost managed what was being done on the bigger machines in arcades.

...Kicking the shit out of me would help too.

Street Fighter 2 on the SNES is likely one of the best arcade to 16-bit conversions attempted. There's a few slight differences and beyond that not much really in the way of gameplay. A few frames of animation have been cut, some of the attack and throw animations are different to compensate for the changes but otherwise all the moves, all the levels and all the music is there in a manner of speaking.

But as a game, what is it like?

And already you're thinking of THAT music, I'm proud of you.

Fundamentally, it's the Mano-a-Mano (or claw if you're Vega) combat of one person and another, going toe-to-toe with some special abilities in a limited arsenal of power moves and special attacks to try to damage the other person enough to drop their health to zero and win the round. Punches, kicks, jumps, fireballs, power moves and throws all add to the roster and fairly uniquely for almost each character (Ken and Ryu being basic palette swaps in this version, later games they differed more significantly in strength and attacks). There's 8 main characters ranging from slight and light Chinese girl, to heavy and chunky slow Russian fighter, to a monster, a sumo wrestler, two shotokan fighters (this was before the retcon to their specific schools of combat), an American pilot and the mystical Indian stretchy man. Throw in the 4 bosses as well and you've a very varied, very colour school of rogues as a 12 character fighter.

I had heard the Russians were capable of some mad dances, this isn't one of them.

There's strengths and weaknesses to every character. Some are faster and more agile. Some are less agile but tend to tank the damage better than others. Some have rapid-fire attacks while others have projectiles, there's a large mix up and almost something for everyone and their preferred style of gameplay. Most of the characters can be paired up with someone else as a "balanced" match (most...) so for two players there's a lot of different combinations of fighters to use and enjoy together.

Hardly seems fair to fight a stretchy man who can teleport and breathe fire.

Each character has their own stage and level, which you'll encounter while playing through arcade mode and see the focus, fine detail and attention gone into the presentation of the game. It's a wonderfully smooth game, with lush graphics for the machine and fluid, very responsive, gameplay that brings about one of the best reasons to actually own a Super Nintendo Entertainment System with a controller almost built as if its sole intention was to be able to play this game. 6 buttons, 6 attacks: 3 punches, 3 kicks and a D-Pad to move, it's quite the achievement and mapped almost perfectly for the players to use (though I still switch out the strong and medium attacks). Every few levels or so, you'll encounter a bonus level which is to smash up a car, or break up a wall. The faster you do it, the more bonus points you can score, nothing really pertinent about it but it does make for an interesting change in the game.

The first boss adds that added air of extravagance.

The AI comes across as fairly balanced around level 4 in difficulty while at level 7 it'll test you or make you exploit the AI weaknesses and cause triggers to ensure you'll always be able to do things that the computer will fall for every time. There are some shortcomings in the unfairness factor, such as the computer being able to pull off moves and specials that it couldn't possibly do if played by someone. Such as being able to instantly do moves that require the player to hold for 2 seconds before attacking. Such as Guiles overhead kick and Blanka's rolling ball attack, or E.Honda's blubber bullet for that matter.

It was a tough match, we eventually called it a draw.

By today's standards, the game is slow. But then this is the version before we starting to go Hyper-Turbo-Ex-Plus-Alpha-Mini-Driver-3D-suck-my-arse-off edition. It's core, it's base but it's good and it's enjoyable to the point of becoming tactical as a fighter rather than picking some overpowered prick and hitting people with moves they can't block *coughAkumacough* (love him really) and as a defining point in the franchise and home-computer vs. arcades, you really couldn't have picked a better band wagon to get upon to do it.