rash! Zap! Pow! These words conjure up the world of superhero comics, where a fight, whether between deadly enemies or confused allies, is never far away. Heroes may not have to fight, but nothing brings out the "super" like a good brawl.
Bringing superheroes into a fighting video game is therefore a natural idea. It lifts the characters off the page and enables players to fling energy bolts and smash faces to their hearts' content. Thus comes the "Versus" series from Capcom: X-Men: Children of the Atom, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom and the latest and greatest, Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 offers an impressive roster of 64 fighters, half of them drawn from Marvel comics. These are mostly the X-Men and their friends and enemies, but there's still plenty of room for non-mutants such as Spider-Man, Hulk and Doctor Doom. The other half are the "Capcom team," drawn from video games such as Resident Evil, Street Fighter, MegaMan and DarkStalkers.
Players begins by choosing a mode (arcade-style combat against the computer, "versus" mode against another player, or training) and choosing a team of three fighters. The fight then begins on a colorful two-dimensional battlefield. Fighters perform moves: one-button basics such as punches, jumps and kicks; and multi-button combos covering a range of effects, from Storm's weather control to Rogue's power-draining kisses. Team members normally fight one at a time, but certain combos bring them in to assist and replace one another, or to join together in a screen-filling, pulse-pounding, sense-shattering simultaneous attack.
Combat continues until either an entire team is knocked out or time is up. In arcade mode, a successful player team advances to fight increasingly tougher computer-controlled teams. An option mode allows the player to adjust difficulty, time limit and speed.
At the start, 24 of the fighters are available, half Marvel and half Capcom. Each time they fight or train they earn points that the player can use to buy any of the other 40 fighters.
Good, old-fashioned fun
The control system is of average complexity for a fighting game, meaning that a beginner in the genre will have difficulty pulling off the more complex combos. The team-oriented combos are, luckily, very simple, as most of the strategy in the game arises from switching among teammates.
The fights are dynamic and engaging. The fighters are flamboyant, expressive and great fun to watch as they pulverize one another, and the combo moves are often ingenious. This is particularly true of the Capcom fighters, a bizarre menagerie that can unleash zombies, teeny cacti and immense pirate ships against opponents.
All of this creativity, however, is undermined by dated technical quality.
The graphics are colorful but also very flat and not very high resolution. The sound effects likewise get the job done but don't have much clarity or variety. The designers made a trade-off: rather than present a few stunning-looking fighters, they instead provide a huge number of serviceable ones. Individual players will have to judge whether the trade-off was worthwhile.
Comic book fans will be pleased by the wide breadth of characters, but displeased by another tradeoff: all of the fighters are roughly equal in power, even when the characters on which they're based are not equal. This helps make play balanced, but leads to the incongruous sight of small-timers like Iceman and Captain America wiping the floor with powerhouses like Juggernaut and Magneto.
The point system that enables players to gain additional characters can make the arcade mode more fun, since the better the player does, the more points are earned. Some players will probably be displeased that they're being artificially prevented from playing all the characters that came with the game. There are several ways to cheat the system, however, so clever players won't get too frustrated.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 lacks some flash, but it accomplishes what it obviously tries to do: put as many appealing characters as possible into the players' hands and let them duke it out. While this isn't everything, it should be enough to keep anyone who likes superheroes amused for a long time.
