Press B 224: Is Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection worth it?

Jake, I think today we're gonna take the viewers for a ride. Today on. If you don't say today on. I don't know when to click the button. I forgot. That's how it works. Don't. Today on the intro, we'll get there. It's only 224 episodes. We'll get good by 300. And that. That's the goal I'm setting for our team. Fantastic squad goals. Where's the spreadsheet?

Where's the spreadsheet? Yeah, we got twelve items charged from every one of you son of bitches. And how can we approve this, this. This podcast? Twelve items. We do this, and then maybe we'll get paid one of these days. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of press me to cancel your favorite podcast. Maybe every other week, but this week you just got me in charge. And we're. We're a bit. We're a bit off this week, but that's okay. We're just coming off of that trend of crab week a couple of weeks ago, and we're back again.

Crab week was rough. Week was rough. I want to point out I've been popping in with just Jake quite a bit lately. No, I still love everybody. I still miss everyone. There's no beef between anybody. I just. This just happens to be the days that I'm free as nobody else is.

No, our schedule has been, like, all over the place all summer, and now we're into fall. So we got to try and bring some. Some harmony back. Maybe we can start bringing some guests back on the podcast. We haven't had a guest in a while because it's been. It's been tough getting everybody schedules together because everybody's been sick or working or just kids or busy or just the whole nine yards. It's been a wild couple months. So that's okay, because you know what? We asked around on the. On the crew. Hey, Capcom released this Marvel versus Capcom fighting collection, arcade Classics. That is a way too long of a title for game Capcom. But we asked the team. Anybody? Anybody gonna buy this? Anybody into these games? Anybody? Anybody? Like Marvel versus Capcom series? And I think I asked Wolf. He's like, yeah, I have that. I have the PS two version of NPC two. It's like, it's okay, it's okay.

It's very wolf answer. Yeah, the ringing endorsement from Wolf. Of course, he's talking about a bad port of that game, but we'll get there. So then I asked a charge, do you like these games? Because I know you like, you love you like Marvel characters. You're. You're. I keep forgetting you're like the comic book guy in our podcast. I keep thinking it's just GP, but it's not just GP, it's you as well.

So he's side. I'm the Marvel. I'm the Marvel side, right? Yes, I do. I do like these games, actually. I have fond memories of going to our local arcade where I grew up before they closed down. And one of these games, if not two of them, were on the big screen. So you can play these on the big screen. Oh, really? Way back in there. Yeah.

Okay. And that's like, my experience as well is I played all of these in the arcades when I was a teenager. I was very fortunate to live to, like, a strip mall that had two back to back arcades, which seems odd, but they were both incredibly busy and they both had different games. But guaranteed, anytime one of these came out, they had a copy of this machine, or three or four. They were insanely popular and kind of go about. I know we did some episodes in the past about arcade games and arcade sticks a little bit. But my memory, my core memory of what an arcade machine and buttons and stick feels like is directly related to the marvelous versus Capcom games and the Street Fighter thing. The. It's in the. If you're in Japan, it's different hardware, but in North America and Europe, that you had that like bat style stick and the six buttons, that is, is the perfect layout for my hands. When it comes to nostalgia. I don't play that way nowadays. But I like that layout when I was a kid, so I always remember that. And I even have a fight stick in that with those components. That's one. And one of the reasons I built it is because of these damn fighting games. So I definitely have a lot of nostalgia this for this franchise as well. So, I mean, spoilers. You and I have not bought this collection. I think we've been talking about it, debating and thinking about it. Well, I wanted to kind of.

If anybody in the podcast going to buy it, it's going to be you or I, or if not both, because you and I have a problem. Please see a previous episode where Jake and I discuss our FoMo addiction and be proud. I still have not bought black myth Wukong. So I think I'm. I think I'm fighting it pretty well. You're doing pretty good. You're probably doing better. Night. I just bought UFO 50, so I spent $25 there. But I have not sold the states.

Of the truck simulator that I picked up because they were $4 a piece. But let's not, let's not discuss that. Gosh, yeah, I mean we're spending money, but I mean this is, this is a collection that's, it's not $70. What is this collection? Is that 60 us dollar, 50 US? I think so. I think 49.99. And you know, I don't know what the conversion is in canadian there, but nobody cares.

Nobody watches us. It's canadian, it's just me. So it comes with seven games. So I thought it'd be fun to just kind of quickly go through and just give our hot take on the games that are in this compilation and any memories we have of this from the arcades, because we likely played these in arcades. And then I do want to spend a little bit of extra time in the last one. The most recent game, Marvel versus Capcom two, there's been some fun news on that one. And to be honest, that's the game that kind of really ties this collection together. And a lot of folks have a lot of nostalgia for that particular game. So we'll spend a bit more time, more time on NBC two. But to start off with the first game in this collection, and it's also kind of an oddball for a collection devoted to fighting games. It's the Punisher, so, which is a beat em up. Now I played a little bit of this, but I think you said you have beaten this one.

Yeah, I played it a while back for one of the charity events that I did. Um, I picked up some arcade, arcade Fighters and, and I've never played the punisher at the time, so we scooped it up and, and played that one and, and it was, it's fun. It's a fun beat em up. You get to play as, you know, Frank Castle or as Nick Fury, the. White Nick Fury, the old school one.

You don't get to play as the Samuel Jackson. And it's a beat em up. And there's some, there's some really cool stages where you, you use your gun primarily and, and then there's some beat em up action into it. Um, I really liked it. It's, it's a standard beat em up. There's nothing really super special that stands out about it other than you're the Punisher kicking the shit out of punks. And, and you fight the kingpin, who is enormous at the end of the game as most final bosses are in the old arcade games. Um, I specifically remember going, holy shit, the kingpin is taking up half the screen. He's a big dude. So that might be overdramatic, but over dramaticized, but he is very large individual in that particular. In particular game. But yeah, it's standard. Beat him up. It's weird. Like Jake said, it's weird. We have a fighting collection, an arcade fighting collection, and they snuck in the Punisher. I don't know what they were thinking because, I mean, you've got the original beat em up, the original Avengers beat em up. You've got X Men beat him up, which is a classic why stuff the Punisher in there as like a bonus for a fighting game collection? That's weird to me.

It is. It is kind of odd. And I'm wondering if it has to do with maybe the. The previous games that Capcom's released in this kind of style because they had a Street Fighter collection which, which I did buy a number a couple years back and that was packed with games. Although to be fair, I think at least three versions were Street Fighter three. But there's more games on paper, I guess. So maybe for this collection they wanted to flesh it out a little bit longer, a little bit more. There's other versus games in this franchise that's not included in this. There's one on the Wii. I think it's Capcom versus some japanese anime franchise.

Or is it SNK?

No. Well, Snk is another one as well. SNK is the studio that does like Sam show and Fatal Fury and Terry Bogard and all them. And that's definitely another franchise. And that's actually coming as a collection in the future. They announced that one is something that's in the works. I'm actually excited for that one. We can talk about that later. But I guess this one, just because it's the Marvel license that they have and that was the big thing, right? They at times lose the license to these and they had to pull them from the store and we'll get there. But for Punisher, I guess maybe it's just one they already had. Maybe it was easy to port, or maybe they already had a port in the works. I mean, who knows? I know Capcom. Capcom has a, like a client for arcade games that they brought a couple years ago onto Steam and they've been adding like one off purchase or buys for that collection. You can add like ghosts and goblins, I think is part of it. And there's a few other ones. So maybe they had Punisher ready to go for that. But then when they realized they had a fighting game collection, they're like, we need another game. Let's bring it in. Could be that, maybe, but it's still a Marvel character, so.

No, I get it. It's just. It's a strange thing. It's, to me, and I'm. We're going on a tangent here a little bit, but if I were to make a beat em up collection, I'd put, you know, Captain Commando, and then I put the X Men one. Yes.

But I guess I think acclaim might have had the rights to the original X Men, or. I don't remember the exact company, but it was. It obviously wasn't Capcom. So I didn't even think that Punisher was probably owned by Capcom, and that's why they. They shoved it out there. So that's actually not just title. I don't think of owners of who has the games.

Well, like, the X Men arcade game that everybody loves from back in the day was a Konami game. Right? So they had the license to that one. So I see that one up included. But you made a good point about captain commando. The other one was cyberbots, which are both Capcom beat em ups, and both feature characters that are in another game. We'll talk about shortly. Cyber, those titles. Well, Cyberbots is already in another Capcom fighting package.

That's right, that's right. That's in the. The beat em up collection. They did. That's true. They have dark stalkers that and then the. The red lion one and then something else. But cyber bots is in that. In the. In that. I actually played that the other night.

Okay, great. Interesting. Yeah, so they definitely. I guess they're just spread thin. I don't know. Maybe that's why they just, you know, these other games have. These games. So we have Punisher, I guess. But anyway, punishers, it's a solid beat em up. It's interesting. I just. It is. When you look at this collection as like a. I guess for like a history of the genre, it's not the same genre. It's right. Like, these games have more in common with, like, you know, Street Fighter two than they do the Punisher. But it's fine. It's a. It's a fine game. It's a beat em up. I do like Capcom's beat em ups. The great thing about all these games, except for the last one, is they're all showcasing Capcom's pretty famous hardware for the day. Right? They had their. The CPS one and CPS two. Mostly CPS two, which is just an iconic arcade hardware that they ran most their fighting games right from street fair two. Up to, up all the way up to NBC. So it's. And I believe the Punisher was on the first version of that hardware. If I'm not wrong, it might have been the second. So it's all running on the same arcade hardware. So I guess the history is that part.

And that's, I think, what the biggest draw for me for this particular bundle is. It's the classic arcade look style hardware that went with it. So it's not some port that came over to PlayStation two or Dreamcast or whatever. It actually looks and feels like it used to back in the day. So that's a big pull for me because, you know, you can port all these games over to these consoles and it's great. It just doesn't feel the same. Like the latest version of Marvel versus Capcom, the infinity or whatever the hell it was called, where they, they're all three. Djdehe looks awful, plays awful. It's not fun. I don't, I can't stand it. It's like the last good version was two, and then beyond that, they just kind of went, let's make three D stuff, and it just didn't, it doesn't work as well as this other stuff does.

It's. It's funny you mentioned that because, so that that game I bounced. It was on game pass. I bounced off of NBC three because it looks so terrible. And if I'm not wrong, that's the one. He's a content creator and streamer, really well known, named Maximilian. Dude. He's like a mascot for the FTC. Like, he's all over the place. He's very, very entertaining guy. Very knowledgeable about the genre. And he kind of like, saw somebody who did some. Some texture mod work on some fighting games. And because a lot of the fighting games these days are using Unreal engine. So we saw the work of somebody doing retexture job for a fighting game. And even though it's a 2d fighting game, it's still behind the scenes, 3d models and stuff. He liked their work enough that he said, hey, can you do this for NBC three? So he's actually doing a huge mod project. Project. Like he's paying people, getting artists, people to work models, music inspired by the original soundtracks, but new music tracks, the whole nine yards. I'm surprised he hasn't been shut down with a DMCA request. It's that involved. You'll still have to own the original game. But he's taken the style where, like, the big complaint of that game was that the characters look ugly. The models are awful. So he's been doing like a comic book style or manga style with what they call the tone patterns, with the. The half tone dots and the colors and the shading for shading. Very comic book style shading. So he hasn't doing that kind of stuff. Readjusting shadows, the whole nine yards. It looks really fantastic enough that I might buy that when that comes out to play the mod pack he's doing. So we'll have to love to see, because that game has a wide roster.

I absolutely support that in all ways. Shape or. I mean, if it looks anything like two does or any of these previous ones sold, I mean. Yeah, yeah. I don't know when that comes out. I think maybe, maybe Presby can revisit. Look at that. Lack games. I would like to get the game another fair shake because I like a lot of the characters that were in that game, but I don't think I gave it a fair shake gameplay wise because it was so damn ugly.

Yeah, until you had to buy Venom and buy like your common characters because they were DLC packs. Fuck you. Well, that's. That's. And that's. That was the stuff. That's the style it is now. But I know back with these games, we didn't have that, thankfully. So what? So real quick, the punisher I think is a great. It's fine to include it. It's weird, but I think it's a great game. So I would give a thumbs up for that one to be included. Yeah. Yep. Agreed.

Okay, next one is 1990 four's X Men, Children of the Atom. This was the X Men only fighting game. And I have to look at the roster here for who's in this one. This. Bare bones. Yeah, this is like Colossus, Cyclops, Iceman, juggernaut, magneto, omega red, Cyclox, Sentinel, silver samurai. Forgot about him. Spiral, storm, Wolverine. And Akuma was a hidden character. Yep.

I remember playing this in arcades, never running into a friend from a previous grade. He was like, oh, I'll play a few rounds. And I'm like, okay, sure, we'll play. And he played Wolverine. And I've never seen somebody cheese the buttons mashing like I've ever seen this guy play Wolverine before. It was just constant mashing. And I remember getting so salty, I swore off this game for six months. But that's what these games are, right? They're definitely. They're definitely. If you button mash, you can definitely do well enough for. Against people like me who don't know what they're doing, I guess.

Wolverine. Did you play much of this one? I did, I did. I played it a lot. I might. My childhood friend growing up was an avid Wolverine fan. And of course, I liked, I liked Ice man. And was gambit in this one? Gambit. Should have been in this one. Yeah. Not in this one. No.

Might have been psylocke then. And I used to play with those two characters quite often, but he'd fucking corner me with that berserker barrage bullshit, and I just, I got so mad that I just wanted to beat him. So I spent numerous hours learning how to beat him and never did. Because you can't. He cheeses you. Just cheeses the shit out of you. But aside from getting my ass kicked by Wolverine every single time I play it, this was a great game. This was one of the earlier ones, 94, you say, God, it doesn't feel like that. It feels so much newer than that. I know that's insane, but, yeah, no, this was one of the ones that was in the old, the old arcade I grew up in. And we'd, I play the shit out of this at the arcade. When I get there, when I could get up there, there was always a line, like, wrapped around the arcade cabinet just to get in there. So you'd have to put your quarter down and then wait your turn. And, and, uh, Sam's town was bumping when, uh, children of the Adam were in there. That was, that was a great game to play, that and street Fighter, they were right next to one another. You could play either one of those two on the big screen.

And I think, I think that's why I like this one for, for quite a bit, is because I was terrible Street Fighter, too. I said before, like, I appreciate Street Fighter now in 2024, but when I was a teenager, I could never get my brain around how all the normal moves were so different character to character. I was more of a moral combat kind of kid, so. But at least when it came to the X Men game, again, I could button mash or I could be cheesy with it. I remember, I remember playing Cyclops a lot, mostly because Cyclops, I think it was his strong punch, third punch was him actually doing an optic blast, just like a projectile, small projectile. He, of course, had a bigger one too. Right? And I love the voices in this game, right? He's like, optic blast, berserker barrage. Wolverine. Yeah, I just saw here, they, apparently they got the voice cast from the cartoon, the Fox cartoon show, to do the voices on the video game, which, as limited as the lines are, that's really. Damn.

You are. You're making this very difficult to pass up after this episode because now I want to play it really bad.

Yeah, that's pretty awesome. That's. That's neat. This is a really cool one. Not a huge roster of characters, but it does fit the. The timeframe. Right? This was a couple years after Street Fighter two, and to be able to play characters like this from the comic book, so well drawn sprite wise. The sprites are so well drawn. And a lot of. A lot of fan favorite characters in here. Right. Especially if you're a fan of the cartoon. Like, I was right. Having Wolverine, of course, and Cyclops is really cool. Storm, I think, was one of the characters. I said, yep, that's a pretty awesome game. Definitely not one I would play maybe today, but for the time, I definitely think it's great. And that's awesome that's included in this collection.

Yeah, yeah, no, this is definitely a thumbs up for me. This is. This is a great. This got me into more fighting games from that point on because, you know, everybody was playing Street Fighter. Street Fighter was a huge deal. And I was like, street Fighter is cool and all. I like Blanca. You know, I liked anything that I could quickly tap a button and do a super move. That was nea. And then we were during the nineties, that, the early nineties, I was pretty heavy into collecting comic cards and some comic books, but mostly the card versions of them, and they released children of the Atom, and we were like, sign us up. Let's go play this stuff. And we'd. We play the hell out of it. Like you said, it was a small roster, so we're like, we hope this continues to grow. And it certainly did, because then it gave us the. The other half of these games.

This is pretty. Yeah, this is pretty rad. Okay, so thumbs up for me as well. And then, you know what's funny about this list? They're all, like, a year apart, so 94 children, the Atom, 95 Marvel superheroes. We were eating when it came to the fighting games for that. Oh, yeah. Every year there's something brand new, right? Yep.

So Marvel Superheroes is 95. That one has. Yeah. This is where they started getting great. They started bringing a bunch of folks. Right? They got Captain America, who's great. Doctor Doom. I remember loving him. Yeah. The Hulk and the juggernaut together. Like, both screen filling sprites. That was pretty awesome to see Iron Man. I remember loving the hell out of Iron man in this game, Cyclock. Spider man was an easy character to pick up.

Spider man was my boy. Once they announced that Spider man and Iron man were going to be a part of this game, I was sold. Absolutely sold. I love, you know, everybody knows, at least people that listen to the podcast know that Spider man and Venom are my two favorite characters in the Marvel universe. So anytime there was an opportunity to play as Spider Man, I was signed up. Very much signed up.

Yeah, yeah. I love this one. This one was a lot of fun. Yeah. Thanos, Wolverine, and everybody's favorite character, Schuma, Gorath. I don't know who the hell that is. He was the green squiddy guy. Yeah. He's the activist guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I remember him. But this was the game. This is the one that brought in is the war of the gems, I think. Right. So you had the. The Infinity Stones way before there was the MCU, you had the Infinity stones dropping as power ups in a fighting game, and they would each do something different, I think damage or armor or super meter, something on those lines. I remember not understanding what any of them did, but it was fun picking up anyway. But it was definitely a game where I think if you. If you're a pro at this, if you really studied what everything did, which was always hard for me as a kid, but if you have you learned this game, I think you could do some really awesome stuff with the gems of. This is a good one.

Yeah. I mean, Infinity War was happening long before we even knew we were going to have Marvel movies coming out from this whole thing. So I have the original book of them all. But, I mean, getting the gemstones, reality stone, and the time stone, we, like, speed you up, and reality stone gave you, like, projectile powers, and it was just, there's some really cool stuff that the stones did. And being able to, like, like you said, beat the shit out of someone to get the stone to pop out of them and to pick it up, it was. It was, like, rewarding. It's that whole endorphin hit when you hear the ding, ding, ding, you know, oh, shit, I got a stone. I gotta go get it. I don't know what it does, but I'm picking it up. Like, there's some really, really cool stuff in there.

Yeah, that was a good one. So up to this point, I mean, the title, this collection was the. The Marvel versus Capcom fighting collection. We haven't had any versus games. No. And now we're. Now we're at the first versus game, which is X Men versus Street Fighter. This is the one I remember playing a lot of when I was a kid. And I got video if you want to talk about this one while I pull that up real quick.

Yeah, I mean, the first introduction, it was, this is the first, like, crossover that we could, that I could remember between, you know, the superhero games and then your long standing street fighter coming in. And they just merged the two together and brought some really, really cool characters and some really cool additions to it. I mean, you get to play as Ryu and Iron man at the same time, or war machine or whoever. I think it was Iron man on this one, but. And then Gambit was there and, and I just was there. Rogue was there. There's just some really neat matchups that you can do with this particular game. And, and, um, and just having, like, like you said, having the street fighter characters there is your choice, too. It really brought, it merged the two together because for a time there, there was a lot of street Fighter people and there was a lot of Marvel fighting people. And now they're bridging the gap between the two of them. So you could still play Ryu and Wolverine if you want to, and have fun with that, with that kind of a matchup. So this was before. I think you can have multiple characters on your team. I think you only played as one guy at the time. Still.

No, this is two. This is the two first. Okay. Yeah, this is another. This is revolutionary for a couple of reasons. So one is that it's the. You get two characters. So I was. I was. I had to double check this today. In terms of a fighting game, that gives you. Gives you more than one character in a team. I believe the first game of that was king of the Fighters. King of the Fighters 94 let you pick teams and that had three characters. But it wasn't a tag game. I thought it was, but it's not. It's. It's literally one guy dies, you, the round ends and switch different character. This is the first fighting game, as far as I can tell, that has a team of two and you can tag them in at any time to switch characters. So this is pretty awesome because I remember, I remember after this game, other game franchises started trying to copy the tag style battle. Right. Like, Tekken had it and other games had it. So this was kind of neat.

It's crazy to think that anybody like, this is just, it's the perfect combination. Like, if you're a huge Tekken fan, then I guess that would make sense that you would be like, I'm going to grab lord Voldo and. Or is that Virtua fighter? I don't remember. I don't know tech very well, but you can get. And then the guy with the panther head, you know, you could do that, but, I mean, you could get Chung Li and Storm, as we saw in the video, on the same team together. So you can have your cake and eat it, too, with the Street Fighter marvel fans, you know, I mean, or you can go, I'm going straight street fighter. Fuck you guys. I'm gonna do Ryu and Ken, and I'm gonna cheese my way to the top, and I. Or, you know, get Wolverine and Gambit and do some cool stuff with that. And then you, like you said, it's. It's a tag team thing, so it's not. When somebody dies, you could call that person in if you're like, all right, I'm going to pull in gambit, do some moves with him, and then pull him out when he gets too tired and put the next one in. It really. It really made for another strategical attack on the game. It made it really, really cool.

I think there's also the game that you could do assist. Yes, it was. You can also call in your. Your tag partner to do a one off move as an assist. That was pretty cool. Pretty awesome. And that's something that was on this one, I thought. Yeah, the next superheroes. Well, Marvel versus Capcom has. Has assisted the system, but it's not your tag partners, it's. It's other characters, and we'll get there. Gotcha.

So, yeah, pretty sure it's tag assist as well. Yeah. Just a lot. A lot of strategy, lot tactics in this one, and just the. The balancing between your two characters, because if a character takes a certain amount of damage, uh, it's. It's yellow damage. So if you tag them out, they can recover some of that health. But if you keep fighting with that one guy, he. And he gets hit again, he loses that bar that he lost, and he can't recover. So I remember a lot of. A lot of playing this one, trying to, like, save the bar for my, my. My tag partner. So I was tagging a lot. And, uh, this is also the first game where I started to use the air attacks more because these games are always exciting. That unlike Street Fighter two, which is very much a ground game, there's a lot of air in the end. This versus franchise, where you could do a super jump up into the air, and you went up like a screen up, and you could do air juggles and air combos. And I remember mostly accidentally pulling them off, but when I did pull them off, they're cool as hell.

And there was, when you could do some of the combos, I mean, the combo system really, I feel like was really solidified in this. I mean, you had, oh, crap. That game that everybody loves, the. The one that was on. Oh, killer instinct.

Yeah, thank you. That's what I was thinking of. That was like combo, combo breaker. Like, that was the big combo game, but it just, you felt like a badass when you can do a, you know, a ten hit combo and launch them into the air and keep fighting them and doing some crazy stuff in this. This game felt really high flying and really fast for not being a turbo version of something like Street Fighter is known for.

Yeah, I think the difference between this and something like Mortal Kombat or killer instinct is, is those other games, you had to really memorize the combos and there wasn't a lot of flexibility in them. Whereas the street fighter, like the versus games, was a little more open in the combos. You still memorize certain ones. But I felt like even that back then, I think as long as I knew what the air launcher was in a couple, couple chain moves of specials to normal or normals to specials. I was pretty good with this game. I still. I mean, I was never great at these fighting games, but I love playing them. And I had no issues beating these in the arcades, but only because I kind of picked up a few combos and it's mostly trial and error, whereas when I played killer instinct, even today. Forget it. I don't know those combos. I don't have time to memorize 50 inputs for unbreakable timing windows. Just forget it.

Yep.

Yeah. It's the same reason why I liked some of the older guilty Gear games is because the, the combo system was as long as you're doing the attack strength in the right order, you'd combo no problem. And then the later game is a little bit different. So, yeah, I like it when the combo system is nice and easy for experimenting with noobs. Right. When you're a new player and you want to experiment. I like it that way better. But yeah, this was a great one. I really did like this one. The final boss. Let me jump to the final boss in this one. Was this not apocalypse?

I think this was a apocalypse. Yeah. How awesome is that for a single player fighting game?

A boss fight like this was really, really neat. And his sprite is so freaking badass. I was very impressed with. With this whole, like, system and how this, this game works. And this just brought more, like, cooler fights later into the game. Like, this was kind of a. Yeah. Or in the series, this was kind of like the gateway if we're gonna do this. And then they took it and. And did the same thing in the other versions of the games that we're gonna talk about here in a few minutes, but. Mm hmm.

I fighting your partner. That's hilarious. In this video we're watching. That's very spots, very streets of rage. Yeah. Or double dragon. There's also, I think Cyber Akuma was in this one as a hidden boss, I believe. Yeah. I'm not wrong. Anyway, what a weird character. Cyber Akuma has got the one wing. What the hell is that about, dude? I don't know.

Well, you know what? It's. It's fun, though, because it's. It's the crossover factor, right? You're taking. You're taking completely two different universes, and you're trying to meld it together, and you're trying to have a boss. That kind of makes sense, I guess. So when the final boss is a. Is an X Men villain as cool as Apocalypse is, he has no. He has no relation to street Fighter or anything, so it's neat to have a kuma who is. But Akuma, on his own, can't compete with Apocalypse. You have to cyber him up to.

Put a mega buster arm on him and give him some wings. Yeah. Cybernetic work for what's his face, not angel. What's what's his name after? Archangel, my dude. Archangel. Yeah. I love Archangel. I'm a comic book fan. I I wish Archangel was in the fighting games. That's. That's one that they should have put in that they never did.

You know what game he is in? Marvel snap. He's Marvel snap. I remember, right. He, if you have been your deck on the first turn, he flies into the. Into play, I think, is what it was. It's been a while since I played. All right? So, yeah. Marvel versus. Marvel versus. Marvel versus Snapdein. X Men versus Street Fighter. Oh, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe X Men versus Street Fighter did not have the assist. That was.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I didn't mean to call you, but I could have sworn it was introduced for the first one. You're right. You're right, because the next game is 1997. So again, a year later, we have Marvel superheroes versus Street Fighter. I almost forgot this existed. What was in this one? Do you remember this one?

I do, but I don't remember it specifically because I felt Marvel superheroes versus Street Fighter was basically the expansion of Marvel superheroes. So they just took that cast and brought them and dropped them into. This was like the initial Marvel versus Capcom before they decided to add characters from, like, cyber bot and, oh, like Red Riding Hood and dark stalkers and all those other characters. This still was still primarily around street fighter. So you had, like, in bison and, you know, Ryu and all those regular characters. I forget. The boss of this one might have. It might have actually been in bison. For the boss of this one, you have to look that one up, and someone's gonna have to fact check.

Let me pull. Let me pull it up. For the roster, though, it is quite a bit different in terms of the Marvel characters. They got rid of most of the X Men, which is kind of a shame. They still have Cyclops and Wolverine, but Wolverine was so popular in the nineties, didn't they drop. This is where they. They took out Iron man and gave you a war machine, I think. I don't remember, which is basically just a different color palette. Iron man, not in this one, but he is. He is.

Later on, it's. It's in the second one.

So the. The roster for this one, then, is black Heart, Captain America, Cyclops, the Hulk, Mephisto. I remember him now. Omega red, Shamagorath. They really like shama, Gorath. Spider man, and us agent. Oh, no usage was a hidden character. I'll get to that in a sec. And then the Street Fighter characters was Chun Li Dan, because. Sure tells him Talzum ken m. Bison, Ryu, Sakura, and Zangief. But this was the one that had quite a number of hidden characters, and they're. They're mostly palette swaps. Like, there was Shadow Lady. Shadow lady was a. Basically the chungly sprite, but dark like black, although they gave her some, like, mecca moves for some reason. It was kind of weird. There was Zengee, but then there was also Mecha Zangief. And if I remember right, he is. The character has super armor, but can't block or something weird like that. There was. There was some weird quirks with the hidden characters. All I remember is somebody being. I think this is one of the orange Hulk. Is that what I'm probably saying this wrong? I just remember the hidden characters being a lot of inputs to pick one, waiting for somebody to go through the motions to get it, and then just overpowered. Kick my ass with those characters. Right. That's all I remember. With them because, yeah, us agent was is a pallet swap of Captain America. And the movies are slightly different. Fundamentally the same, but a little bit different. Right, but that's pretty awesome. I wonder if that's, like, the most hidden characters in a fighting game. It's got to be up there, right? That's pretty interesting.

They're just palette swaps, though. It's not like you got venom running around there. Well, they are pallet swaps, but, I mean, hey, moral combat made a yemenite made a mint off palette swaps. Right? So. That's true. I mean, you have Cyrax and Sektor and Noob, sabot and reptile and all those. Sub zero. Was it sub Mario Lopez Wolf? Yes.

I'm just looking at the final boss for this one because now I don't remember. It was Marvel superheroes versus Street Fighter. Yeah, I want Apocalypse in this one as well. Did they do a double? No, Apocalypse was definitely the final boss of X Men versus Street Fighter. Okay. And then Marvel heroes versus Street Fighter. It says apocalypse. And then the final boss character, Cyber Akuma. That can't be right. Did they seriously use him twice? Huh?

Yep. Cyber Akuma is the size. The final boss for Marvel versus Street Fighter. Weird. Okay. All right, so that's. This is where we get Cyber. Cyber Akuma. Oh, no. Here we go. Here we go. Oh, no, I'm wrong. I'm wrong. I'm reading this wrong. X Men versus Street Fighter, you defeat Apocalypse. Player must win against a final boss battle because Cyberkuba. So I guess maybe they did it twice.

Yeah, he's the second last boss in Marvel. Superheroes versus street Feder. You know, that's probably why I have so much overlap my brain with these. These two games is. I just remember the giant sprite of apocalypse. Right?

That's wild, huh? But, I mean, the one thing with Capcom, too, is they certainly know how to reuse sprites because they did a lot of that. Right? I remember anytime they use Morgan from Darkstalkers, they never, ever gave her new sprites. They just kept ripping them from the games. It was always kind of strange. Interesting. All right, well, still a stellar game either way. I like this one a lot. But again, I think in my brain, I overlap this with X Men versus Street Fighter. Maybe too much, but I love both of these games.

I mean, they are similar. You just get a couple different characters to play. So, I mean, that sounds like a. That sounds like a capcom pool where they're just like, we're just gonna pull the old character from the last one because it was so successful and give you more characters to play. I mean, what, they're a year apart, right? Well, that's the thing, right? Like, the development time on these is stupid. Like a year, right?

It's like they were doing them all. They probably were doing them all in tandem, and then they've just been releasing them periodically to keep. Keep the focus. I mean, fighting games were so popular from the early nineties into the late, you know, early two thousands.

It is wild that we had, like, I mean, how many variations of street fair, two did we have in a couple years? Right? Two turbo championship edition, all that. But here we actually have all these different Marvel versus games and quite a bit difference in the. In the roster, and there's definitely features between the different. The different ones. Speaking of which, the next one is Marvel versus Capcom, clash of superheroes for this one. This one.

Now, this one, yes. You want to go ahead? This one is great. This one came out in 1998.

Yep. This is. This is the one of the pinnacles of greatest fighting games ever created, if you ask. If you want my personal opinion, I mean, the characters you can play as the selections. I mean, this. I believe this interest is venom, my favorite character to play as. And then it had this weird palette swap of Iron man. They decided instead of playing as Iron man, you could play as war machine. I don't know why they did that. I guess it's no different than having Ryu and Ken, but you always typically have. Well, this one is not a good example of that. You usually have Ryu and Ken at the same time, but they decided against it on this time around. So the sprite work in this, the profile pictures of each characters, the movement, everything is clean. I love this game, and I think this is the one with onslaught as the final boss, I think.

Yes, I believe so. Yeah. Which is always a kick ass villain. Right. Where Magneto with Xavier together is awesome.

Yeah, it's. It's a fucking dope fight. But, yeah, this. This introduced the, like you said, the. The assist system, the cool hyper attacks that, like, lit up the entire screen. So you're doing, like, multiple hits on some of these attacks. I mean, some of this shit was just bonkers, off the wall. I mean, you have Captain Commando, you have strider, you have. I think Mega man's in this. You have characters and fighting games that you were like, who the hell thought of putting this guy in here? And they were cool. Like, all the characters were fun. This game was just a blast. Blast to play, and if anything, this and the one that we'll talk about at nauseam here at the end will be are the main reasons I would buy this particular bundle. Because of these two games.

Yeah, I think, like sort of. So behind me, I have an arcade machine, an arcade one up, and I modded it with the Mister inside. The Mister is this great hardware emulator that's fantastic. Being sinister are big fans. We did an episode on it, and I was so hyped to get it and then later get access to all the Capcom arcade fighting games on it, except for the last one that we're going to talk about. That one's on different hardware, but the first game I spun up was Marvel versus Capcom. It's this game. It's pretty fantastic. I'm going to call out Ryu for a second. You mentioned that usually there's Ryu and Ken. So this is the one I remember a lot of. The Ryu in this one is actually special. I guess to save space, you can actually do a move at the start of a match and palette. Swap Ryu to versions of Ken or Akuma and his moves change. It's been a while, but I remember if you do the one move, you become a kuma and you can do the air fireballs like Akuma. Yeah. And then if you do the other move, you can become Ken and you have the additional. I think that's the flaming. Flaming Dragon Punch or whatever or. Yes, that's what it is.

Yes.

So there's different mode changes for Ryu in this one, and that was really cool. Again, it's just that this franchise had that. That hidden stuff like that. The secrets like that, which is wild. Right? The last game had a bunch of hidden characters. This one has things like Ryu can change into one of three forms. It's the same character just. Just, you know, the colors change, but this also has. This has dedicated assist characters. So when you're picking your team of heroes, there's a special sub menu of other characters that are not playable, that you could depict one as an assist, and you can drop into assists. A lot of cameos in there from Capcom's various franchises. I want to say it was roll one of those. I think roll was one. Yeah, but there was like a bunch of different hidden ones there. But you could all. It was picked pseudo randomly as it flew by really quickly. But there is an input you can do to actually pick the character you want. So if you really want one particular health character, you can do a combo to get it. Because I remember talking to some folks who play this game quite seriously. A lot of people kept taking the same helper characters because of the just power level and what they were doing. So they knew the moves for that. So, uh, I don't know. I love the cast in this one. This is when I became a real big fan of Strider. I only knew at this point, knew that of the character from the NES game. I didn't really see how cool he was. Yeah. Other games where he looked like this.

Yeah. Cause, like, he has moves where, like, he, um. He has a bird that flies on screen, drops bombs. He has a. Or a cyber panther that comes running on the screen. He can stick to the walls. He can do this teleport kick. He was one of my favorite characters in these games.

I think he's based off of more of, like, the sega version of Strider versus the original Nintendo version of Strider, which is awful. I badged it, but it's still terrible. But the sega version of Strider felt like. Pardon the phrasing, but it was really hitting his stride during this time. Oh, boy.

I know. And then they. They did a more recent strider, which is great. Well, if we do a strider episode, we will, which we should, because there's a lot of really good Strider games. But, yeah, it felt like this particular version of Strider was meant from the Genesis version of Strider that we got in the earlier years. I think it was one of the. You could call it one of the black box games for the Sega Genesis because I remember Strider, Strider being an earlier release when the Genesis came out. I'm not.

I mean, it's not as old as circus Charlie, but it's definitely. It's definitely one that I meant in the timeframe. It was like a release game, like Super Mario world for the super Nintendo, blah, blah, blah. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, this is an awesome one. Some weird picks in the cast if you're. If you're from North America, right? Like Jin from cyberbots. Most of us didn't know who the hell that was or even played the game. I know. I didn't play the game till much later.

It was so random. He is a. He's a. He is a character from Cyberbots. Right? But he's just a sprite because you're just. You're fighting robots in there. I. So you're not fighting him as a character. He's just one of the pilots of the robots. So it was such a random ass thing to put him in there and give him a moveset. You're like, what the fuck? But, but he uses his robot to fight the fights for certain movesets.

Like the giant robot fish just comes on the screen and punches you. Like, it's just, it's just really bizarre. Yeah. And this had, who's the other character? Like, oh, mega man was in this. I love seeing Mega man in a game like this. And he got not all his moves, obviously, but he still had like the wood shield was there. He had a tornado attack. Rock ball from fucking eight. I mean, there's, there's some really favorite.

It'S, uh, there's no having mega man being in a fighting game with rush behind him, like, and being able to use the move sets with them. That was as a real inventive way of using Mega man too. I thought that was cool. Yeah. Yeah. But Schroder's a badass in this game too. I like Strider.

Yeah. He's definitely a favorite. I loved him. And, like, the levels, the background animation was really good in this. Like, I loved all the characters. Like, by this point they got so good at it. This is the one too, where when you could do a super move, you could, a super move where both of your, your guys come on the screen at the same time and start attacking. Yeah.

I remember doing that by accident and never knowing what the hell I was doing. But I think it's one of those where if you know what you're doing and you triggered on purpose. Right. You can do some really cool stuff. Yeah. Onslaught's the final boss in this one. You're right again. It's just like the first form, really cool, really epic. And then the second form he like, fills the screen. Yep, yep, yep. Really rad.

Onslaught's dope, dope, dope game. This is a great game. Big thumbs up for this one. This would be a huge reason to pick up this particular package. Yeah. And like this is, this is one where I had ways to play it, but, but having an accomplishment like this is pretty rad. This is, this is definitely one of the best ones in the franchise. I'd play this on my steam deck for fucking hours. I would. Yeah.

And I remember, God, I remember how many joysticks did this arcade have to go through? Because you would just hear people slamming, slamming the joystick, trying to pull off whatever move they were doing. And I just, you know, my wife knows when I'm playing fighting games because all you hear is click, click, click.

Click, click, click, click. It's funny because, like, my memory, the first arcade I went to, it was in the back of a video game rental store. And I remember it was noisy, but I remember the arcade sticks never clicking, because when I got a flight sticks nowadays, that was the thing that always was weird to me, is that they make a lot of noise, right? Just forget the buttons. The joystick itself clicks a lot because it's hitting mechanical switches. But I grew up in an arcade that didn't have that. I later found out because I had to look it up. There was a optical joystick that was out at that time, and certain arcade operators were modding in this stick into their machines, because if it's optical, it was less wear and tear. Right. With the switches, you don't have to replace the switches as often. There's other things to worry about. So when I think of arcade machines from this era, for me personally, the sticks were quiet, and all I remember is the sound of it thudding against the side of the hole. People wail. I don't remember the. So I always tell that was awesome. I love, I love the hardware from this age. Yeah, same. This is a great one. Definitely a great game. Let me pull this video down. Okay. So the reason why I think this complicated compilation got so much hype and got so much love is because of the next game, which is Marvel versus Capcom, two new age of heroes. And this. This is like the big one. I didn't really play this in arcades, but this is, it came out in 2000, and I got a dreamcast around that time, and they had a dreamcast port that was stellar. So this is the game that was not, was not released on Capcom's hardware. It's actually released on Sega's Naomi. Naomi board, which, for those who don't know, that's basically the guts of the dreamcast, right? It's a little bit better, but it's that style. And it was the first game in the franchise that took 2d sprites, and they added some 3d elements to the background. Whether you love it or hate it, that's what the game was. But it's basically Sega hardware. So when this got ported to home consoles, which was huge, right? To have a game like this on home consoles, it really was like arcade perfect on the Dreamcast, like, it's really good. Like the other games we talked about, like X Men versus Street Fighter and Marvel heroes and all that, there was, there was ports on PlayStation or Saturn, but I think it was the PlayStation version of one, for example, didn't have the tag functionality or something in it. Like it was always missing something, right? Because to have two characters on screen was nuts. But this is the first one that got a console release that was basically arcade perfect, which is stellar. And I think in part because of the Dreamcast, was that hardware. I think there was a PS two version and an Xbox version of this, but I don't remember either one of them getting good reviews at the time. And I think it's because of limitations. Dreamcast was the 2d machine for fighting game.

So I think I had the Xbox version of this and I was not impressed with it. Yeah. Much like Wolf, I was like, it was okay. It was okay. It was okay. Yeah. So. And that's. That was always neat. Let me pull the video of this one, because this one, I love watching this one.

My dream of these games were always to have the same exact quality that you were playing in the arcade. Right? I mean, you get the same thing when you. When you buy the Manhattan project for the NES, and you think to yourself, I'm totally gonna get arcade version turtles on my NES. And you, it's not gonna look anything like that at all. It's still Manhattan projects. Fantastic game. Don't get me wrong for the NES, but I mean, when you want a fighting game like this, you want it to look like this. Like you want it to come home, sit down in front of your computer or your PC console, whatever the fuck, and play this exact version of what you have. And you never got that. You got some weird thing that was gonna be modded to work with your. Your joys, with your controllers, and it just never felt the same. It's so much better to have the arcade stick. Like, I have a real hard time playing any fighting games without some kind of arcade stick because it just doesn't feel the same. Doesn't feel right. It feels really weird. Really weird.

Yeah. So there's a couple things. So for people watching the video, this is actually the Xbox 360 version, so my badgest dreamcast is better, but that's okay. Well, I'm with. I'm with you on the arcade stick, and that's one of the reasons I built a couple, is because I'm so used to that six button or eight button layout. This, though, was interesting that it was only a four button layout, actually. Right? It was four attack buttons. You had light, and then you had heavy. But if you did the light button twice, it comment. It kind of comboed into one, two. And the second move was basically what would have been the medium attack from the older games. So that was one difference with this one. And of course, you get three characters instead of two, which is just even more bonkers. And the roster, right when this came out in arcades, I believe it was 24 characters when you first turned the machine on. And then over time, as more quarters went into the machine, it would unlock new characters. And I think is the final roster like 56 characters or something ridiculous?

There's a shit ton of characters. There's so many. If I'm not wrong, it's pretty much every marvelous or X Men character that was in prior games is in this. And a boatload of Capcom, Capcom characters, including ones that didn't even have their own games. I remember it was Ruby Hart, which was like the pirate character, and then there was a mingo. I think it was, it was the cactus with the. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep.

Yeah. And both of those were like, I think, concepts of characters that might have gotten a game at Capcom, but they did. They could flush it out and they didn't release it. So they just kind of use those designs for characters in here. But like Tron Bon people like Mega man legends, she's a character in that, and she's in this giant green mech. And her super is a giant, one of those minion Lego men things. She has kills the green.

I always, you know, I always thought her correlation was with Captain Commando because there's the baby character you can play as. That's in the giant mech. So I always thought there was some kind of spinoff from that character and that I didn't realize it was a mega Man Legends character. Yeah.

So that's pretty rad. Just, just a huge roster. Anybody you, you think you, you could think of is probably in this game. They even had two wolverines. I don't remember if you remember that one. They had regular Wolverine and then they had bone Club Wolverine. And from what I understand from an article was at the time, Marvel's like, look, this character is very popular. We want you to have the bone Club Wolverine. So, so just include them. Have both of them in there because.

It was like the same layout, but as claws were brown instead of silver. And they moved a bit more. Yeah. There wasn't a whole lot of different.

Feels faster or something like that. There's. There's subtle differences with the characters. I love that. I liked how you could pick when you're picking your team. They definitely do the assist for you. So you now have two assists. You have one from one character and the other from the other partner, but you chose what kind of assist they would do, right, if you wanted a character who did an error assist. You can do that or a ground one. Like, there's three options for each character as an assist, and it's something like, at the time, I probably didn't appreciate, but now when I go back to play it, I'm just. Just like, the options you have to build a team is mind boggling to me.

Well, shit. You can get. You get three different characters that you can run with, and you can do the combined super move, or you can. You can. If you.

Like, you said when Jake was saying, like, if you're seasoned at this, you can hit one person with one super move and then pull another character in and immediately do a super move. And you can link and stack the super moves to basically annihilate anybody that comes in there. And then when the next. Next poor soul that jumps in there and you're in the middle of a super move, you just rip through them, too. It's. It's such a great system. This looks so bad on Xbox, but, man, it's such a.

Let me find. Let me actually find real footage of this one. Hold on. Because I want to show what it looks like, because it's like the. The version that came in the collection is the arcade version, right? So all the characters are right there. Let me see if we can find it here. I love venom in this maximilian, dude.

I'm sorry. We'll give you credit, but don't. Don't. Don't sue. Okay. Is that him talking? That's him talking. Never mind. We won't show your stuff off. Yeah, here we go. No, that's four years ago. Really? I can't just find. Wow. Footage. You would. Yeah, yeah. How do you play? Became. Donkey san was in this game, the monkey girl. Yeah, I remember that. That was. You can even play as the little Lego guy, too. I forgot that he was a character in here, too. Is he? Yeah.

Oh, I thought he's a move. I didn't realize the thing.

He was down in the corner. Unless that's her sprite. It could very well just be her. Her picture for. For it. But anyway. Anyway, this game is spectacular, and one of the main reasons to pick this thing up is. And it's just to have the. Like I said, the original artwork of the game super cleaned up still looks very comic booky, and it's. It's still. It's badass. It's just. It's super badass. And I would pick this up in a heartbeat. When. When you guys announced it on discord, I was like, what? Stop stop giving me things to pick up. So, you know, I'm. I'm. I am always gonna be a huge lover of the Marvel versus Capcom series fighting collection. I think this was a great combination of games and a great combination of characters. And then you start adding the dark stalker characters in that I love. Really only Morgana and Morgan and Lilith, I think, appears in another one, but which is sad because it's just another fucking version of Morgan. There's so many cool characters and Darkstalkers you could have used.

Yeah, that's the thing with these is they don't give enough love to dark stalkers. They had, they never have. It's one of those franchises where I kind of wish they would do a more recent game of it, but I don't, I don't know if they could pull it off. I don't know if there's demand for it, to be honest. Right. I mean, you could get the, you get the Capcom fighting collection and then you've got all, even the japanese versions of Dark Stalkers there too. Fan? Yes. Which is really rad. Yeah.

So this one is really interesting in that it was definitely a fan favorite. Everybody loves this one. And a lot of people, their memories of the versus franchise in arcades ended with this game. Right? I mean, we got a third game much, many years later, but it was, this is pretty much the last of the franchise. So there's a lot of great. Back to this, right? Is trash. Yeah, there's other one. I mean, there's the Marvel, there's the Capcom versus SNK franchise, which I like a lot too. But it's totally different than this.

Right? That was a little bit more serious in terms of gameplay. This one was always more bombastic. Comics jumping through the air really tall, crazy, like full screen supers with three characters. It was just a wild time. Right?

So this came out, it came out in 2000. Stellar port and Dreamcast, as far as I'm concerned. Arcade, perfect. I love the Dreamcast for that. And then it got a release later on on Xbox 360 and PS three, Xbox Live Arcade version on Xbox 360. And then the P's network had one. So it did get a rerelease. It was done by digital Eclipse in 2009, who did that? And they seemed to be okay with online support, which was pretty good. I mean, the MVC two, the Dreamcast version in Japan had online support, but they didn't have that over here. They took it out of. Because of whatever reason. Right? Like Dreamcast had the online support for some games, but it was always weird. Yeah, I don't think it was nearly what it. What we expect from something like that today. So they took it out. So this is the first time to play it online, I guess, was on Xbox 360 and P's network on PS three. But then Capcom, I guess, lost the license or they didn't want to renew it, so they had to take the games down and they took them down in 2013. So that was the big. That was the big issue. That was a big outcry from fans of this franchise. In this particular game. It's a game that's really great. They have lots of fond memories of it. But after this got taken down, there's been no legitimate way or good way to play these games online or to play these games in general. Right. Like I. Like I said, I have the mister behind me which runs CPS two stuff. This wasn't CPS two, this was Sega hardware. It was different. Different hardware. So different emulation. Right. I remember at the time in the emulating a bunch of games with, I think it was final burn, I think I used, or trying to eventually on Mame, but there was emulators for these games. But again, MVC Two wasn't a CPS hardware. It wasn't as easy to emulate. It was basically Sega arcade hardware. And the emulation support for that didn't come till much later. So this is always the hard one to play. Unless you had a dreamcast kicking around, I guess, right? So, I mean, it even got an iOS version. What? An iPhone version. Weird. So after it got ticket taken down in 2013, we went through basically a decade where nobody was able to play NPC two. And then we said his name earlier, maximilian dude had this big Twitter campaign, free NPC two hashtag, to try and get support for it. And, like, he's a popular dude. He actually got one of the folks, Mike Mika, over a digital eclipse who did the 2009 port of the game, interested in trying to bring it back, but I guess they couldn't get licensing or it didn't come to fruition, so it kind of just disappeared. Kind of just the back burner. I give it 2021. He was really pushing hard for these, and just nothing from Capcom crickets. And there's also the pandemic. So, you know, they're kind of busy. But I mean, fans could play these games in other ways. There's a thing called Fightcade, which again, goes back to emulation, right? But fight Kate is like an interface of. I mean, I'm sure people listen to this, probably already know but fight Kate is like a package. It's a client you download, you basically get your Roms and their arcade Roms and it packages emulators together and let you join online with other people in rooms to play these games online. It works pretty damn well. It's a little bit clunky. I tried using again this week to play NPC two and it's running off of, I want to say flycast. It's a dreamcast emulator to play and it's clunky, but it works and it works pretty well for what it is. And that's, I think the way that most fans of these games have been playing these games for the last 1212 to 15 years.

No. Char, did you end up trying fight Kaid when I gave it to you or. No, no, I haven't had enough time to try and get it, set it up. I think this is the first time I've been in my office for like two weeks.

It's an interesting package. I wish I had numbers on how many people use fight cade week to week. Or rather I wish I checked this before this game dropped because I would have liked to see the numbers because now that it's actually available in a more packaged form, in a form that not only fighting game, you know, fans are going to be able to play, but anybody can go on Steam and buy this thing and hop right in without any. Without any clunky interface. But even on Steam right now, Steam Charts has this game at around 1500 players, a 24 hours peak. I think the peak was 2000 when it first launched, which is not. It doesn't sound like a lot of people playing this game online, but if you compare this to basically any other fighting game, that's actually not bad. I mean guilty Gear Strive, which is the most recent guilty gear from a couple years ago that hovers around 2000 players and even something like street fighter six I want to say is like 6000 players on Steam. It's not as high as you think it is. When we look at the Steam charts list of games like Helldiver is right now, even post all the crap they've been going through as a patchy and stuff, they're still at 19,000 at peak in 24 hours peak. So with games like that or like, you know, Stardew Valley is like 30,000 or something ridiculous, right? So the fact that, you know, all these games are so high in Steam charts, but there's, there's still people playing these fighting games but they're still very small community. So I'm hoping that vc two sticks around in popularity and gets more people invested in fighting games and kind of brings a new crowd. Because I'll tell you, when you play these games online, if you're not like somebody who grew up with them, you're going to get wiped.

Oh, yeah, without question, I have a hard time playing these games online because of that. I think I lose my enjoyment factor of just getting tossed by somebody. It's like playing. I'm not a Call of Duty guy, but I attempted to do some modern warfare back in the day just to see what it is, and you're getting spawn sniped immediately out the gate, and you're just like, this is not fun for me at all. It pretty much tore me away from doing of that stuff. And it'd be the same thing for this. It would ruin the fun for me. I just like playing against the cpu and maybe some friends that I'm like, Jake and I could play together and it would be fun because we're probably at the same level. Would actually be a challenge for both of us to fight one another, you know, instead of just getting my ass beat by somebody who's been playing this nonstop for, you know, 40 hours a week.

So, yeah, and that. And that's the thing that I wanted to call out this week, too, is so somebody who's really well known in the fighting game community is Justin Wong. Even if you're not a fighting game fan, you've probably heard of his name before, well known in tournaments and all that. And NVC two is like one of his favorite games. I think it's. I think it's the game for him, if I'm not wrong. So he's pretty awesome at it. And I guess it's a bit of a joke he plays online and he doesn't hold back like he knows. I mean, we'll get to in a second, but there's a number of glitches in these games. There's a lot of overpowered matchups. It's a game that has been in esports for a decade, over a decade. And they're just. There's certain matchups that are a bit opde. And he knows all those combos. He knows all those things. So he's been going on online. His handle is the Wasler. So if you played NPC two in the first week of launch, you might have seen him and had the floor completely mopped at the point that there were some steam reviews saying that I hopped on, died in 30 seconds to some guy named the Wasler. I'm refunding this game. There was more than a few like that. The point where he caught wind of it and posted on Twitter, saying, like, what? I guess I'm putting the fun in refund. So, so he, he made a bit of a meme, right, as the bad guy of fighting games as a joke with this. He, he bought the PS five version, went on there, got to the top of the leaderboards, and then he buys the Switch version. It's like the only switch game he has. He's like, I'm gonna go up to the top and yeah, sure enough, no matter what platform, you're not safe. The Weazler, Justin Wong is gonna come for you and he's gonna kick your ass. He's gonna get a coming for you, the wasler. It's such a stupid thing to see the Washington, but like, it's, it's one of those things where it's like, even in arcades, there's always kind of like a, like a, not an honor code, but there's kind of the thing where if you're playing against somebody who's obviously not the same level of skill as you, you took it a little bit easy on them or you didn't pick your main character, I guess, is the thing. Right? Yeah. Like, if I'm playing this game against my kids, I'm not going to pick the three characters. I know. I only know three out of the 56. I won't take those when I'm playing my kids. Right. So it's the same thing online. If, if you're really just beating down somebody in the first round, sometimes you take it easy on them for the second to extend the match a little bit. So it's one of those like, unwritten rules of fighting games. I don't know. I thought, I guess.

So this is why I'm not a father, because I'd, they'd be like, let me get up. I'm like, no, you gotta learn. Life is hard. To be fair, this is something I was not always good at. I still have flashbacks to when my kids and I played Monopoly. It was the frozen version of Monopoly. And they cried at the end of that game because I would not take it easy on them. Are you really playing Monopoly if nobody cried at the end of it? Yeah, that's true. Right. Or even. We all learned a lesson that day.

You finished it should be impressive enough. Well, it was the frozen version. It's a little bit easier, but. Yeah, I hear you. Let it go. Let it go.

But yeah, NVC two was great, but it's not. This franchise had a lot of glitches. Like, we get spoiled these days with patching, right? Game comes out, it gets updated for six months to a year or longer. And especially fighting games, right? Balance patches are a real thing. Street Fighter Six has had several rounds. Tekken will get them guilty gear. Every time there's a patch for guilty gear, people break it down. And what's been changed, what's been buffed, what's been nerfed. Right. It's part of the. It's just part of the way it works now. But back. Back in the nineties, in early two thousands, you didn't have that. So you have games like this that have glitches. Right. Or infinite combos. So the interesting thing for me was when this collection got released, announced and released, I was wondering, would they patch any of that stuff? Like, do they have ability to go back and patch these games? I mean, it's, you know, 20 years later, can you even patch Marvel versus Capcom two? Can you take out some of those glitches? Because if you know those glitches and you're playing online, is that. Is that fair to do? What do you think?

I don't know. I. I'm sorry, I had to think about that for a minute. I mean, if it's there, it's there. See, I'm. If I was like an adamant PvP guy on stuff like that, right? And that's like your thing, you'd be like, well, yeah, I think it's stupid. You shouldn't bash it out. It's part of the thing. But if I was the guy getting my face mopped with that same move, I'd be like, please remove it, because it's so fun for me. I'm not getting anywhere with it. But if it's, you know, if it's in the code, there's so many different. I would say. I would say allow it to be either turned off or. Or adjusted, like. Like in an accessibility thing. You know, like, if you want it, great. Know that you're going up against it and you're gonna have to deal with that. Or you'd be like, I would rather go into someone that's a little less gimpy and attempt to get this through, you know, without at least give me a chance to survive the fight, you know? If you're going to do the juggernaut infinite combo on me, if somebody's standing there playing juggernaut, I'm just going to put the controller down and go get drink because you know I'm not going to get through that. Chances are they know what they're doing.

So, yeah, it's what it's like. It's almost to me like killer playing in killer instinct, right? When you don't know the combos, those aren't glitches. Those are just the way the game works. But if you're on online playing against somebody, you don't know the compos, and then you're just sitting there for three minutes as they finish their 50 move brutality against you. That's what it feels like with the infinite combos. Although you quickly die, right? They did patch a few of them out, but I guess they didn't catch them all, is what they ultimately end up doing. I think Storm had an infinite combo glitch in the corner. Gambit I think was the other one. I could be wrong on that, but I know they patched a few of the infinite combo glitches. And there's one glitch, actually. You mentioned juggernaut, and that's the fun one. I want to talk about this week real quick. He has a move where sciotech power up, I think it's called, or something like those lines. It powers up his next attack. But in the arcades, if you do the move and then tag out right away, he keeps that buff the entire match. So it's kind of like a well known glitch to people who play this franchise and play this game a lot.

Yeah.

And they patched it out. So some people were like, yeah, whatever, it's. That's fair, right? But others are kind of like kind of the take of, well, we've been playing this in tournaments now for 15 years. It's part of the game, it's kind of part of the charm, and there's ways to kind of account for it if you know how to play the game. So it might be unfair to new players, but maybe once they understand what the glitch is, they know maybe to prepare for it, at least be aware of it. So there's a bit of discourse about it. A little bit. But then just this morning, Capcom released an update for the compilation, and they patched the glitch back in. So the juggernaut glitch is in, but they put a toggle in the menu to turn it on if you want. So if you want to play with the glitch, you can turn it on.

There you go. How wild. In 2024, Capcom puts together a compilation and they actually put a toggle in for a glitch because they got pushback on it.

Well, I mean, how many speedrunners do we watch or that we know of that do Capcom games like Mega man and do, like, no zip glitch runs? I mean, it's almost like it's written in the code to have that in there. And so it's. I think it's kind of cool that they were like, all right, we'll let you do it, and then we'll give you the choice on turning it on or off. Like, if you're really going to throw a fit about it, then we'll. We'll put an accessibility thing in there so that whoever wants it can have it. And if you don't want it, you don't have to have it. That's a pretty cool, that's a pretty cool move, I have to say.

For Capcom, it's pretty neat. I don't look at Capcom and go, what are you doing, guys? What are you doing? Like, there's very rarely that I've looked at a Capcom game and been like, what is this? What's wrong with you guys? So I'm not saying never. I've done that with some games, but it doesn't feel like every week, like, we get that for some games that we've been like, there's nothing wrong with this game. Why'd you break it? You know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Capcom has been pretty much on a. Almost like a renaissance the last, like five to six years. Just there's pretty much every game they've released over the last little while has been stellar, right? Their new engine for Resident evil they've been using everywhere. Monster Hunter has been fantastic. I think the only miss for me, and it was only for me, a lot of people still liked it, was Dragon's dogma, too. I didn't care for that one, but people still like that one even. And then this is them listening to the fans, right? They brought out the beat em up collection. They brought out the Street Fighter collection, which is, which early had some issues, but still pretty great compilation. And then they brought out this one, and where they seem to kind of address all the issues that and concerns people had with the previous collections, they kind of resolved that here. And it's a great. A batch of games. And it's, I think fundamentally because they looked. Looked at the. The drive in 2021 from Maximilian dude, right? He's very influential. And it's like, people like these games, they must know that people use fight Kate to get around to play these emulated games. They know tournaments, a huge scene, and this is definitely one of the games that's always prominent. So it's really awesome, Capcom to kind of look at that and say, you know what, fine, you're right. It's 2024. Let's release a compilation of these games so people can play them. So glitch and all, I guess so. I think that's pretty awesome.

Lichen all? Yeah, I mean, Capcom just, it kind of rules the fighting circuit, so, I mean, and I'm not saying they're the only ones, but they're, they're big names in the fighting circuit. So it just seems to me like a brilliant idea to, to release this as a bundle and let people for $50. I mean, you get seven games out of that. That's, that's pretty good. I'm all about that.

Pretty good value. Yeah. And, like, for me, I think the only reason why I, I ultimately probably won't buy this is because I can play all but one of these games, no problem. On the mister behind me. I can play them in arcade layout today. No problem, because they're emulated out in the mister. That one. That last one, though, MVC two almost has me. So it's the same reason with the Street Fighter collection. I bought that a few years back. Only reason I bought it is because I could play Street Fighter two and Alpha on the machine behind me, but I couldn't play Street Fighter three. And I really wanted to give that game an honest on a shot, and I want to play a good version of it. So I bought the collection. So it's the same for here. I kind of want it, but I kind of don't want to spend $50 for a collection. I won't. I won't play every game in it. I don't think. I don't think I need to because I can play. I can play those today. The only thing I think this compilation really sells for me is the online play. But I'm bad at these games, and I don't think I want to play online. I don't want to get wazzled.

Yeah, I would like not to get beat up by the Wasleregh.

Yeah. So, but I mean, if, like, for you and I to play, or if you want to have like, a Presby night of fighting games, it's so easy to just use fight Kate for free, right. Emulation or whatever. But, but I think if you have any interest in the online play and legitimate playing these online with more than twelve people I mean, I think the compilation is pretty worth it. It's out for Switch PS five. Yeah, switch PS five and switch and steam and PC. Not Xbox, though. Although after some back and forth, it looks like they're gonna bring it to Xbox next year. I guess Kavanaugh has some kind of issue with the Xbox. I don't know what the hell it is. Something tells me it's probably the. The requirements of having to support Xbox X and S. I could be wrong there, but a few of these collections missed the Xbox. And this is. This almost happened here. But they came out announced. No, it's coming next year, so. But, yeah, if you want to play online, this is probably the way to go. But if you just want to play single player emulation is so good nowadays, and there's so many ways to play it. I don't know. But either way, fantastic games. Just really fantastic games. And I hope. I hope it drums up interest in a new one. I know the third game didn't do very well. There's a. I mean, we said before there's a mod coming that looks really awesome, that's fan made. Maybe that will also help kind of push that boulder to build momentum to get a fourth Marvel versus Capcom four. That'd be awesome. I wouldn't mind seeing that.

And, yeah, I mean, if you're. If you're keep bringing back the nostalgia, and if that mod comes out, you've got this bundle that we talked about tonight, and then if that mod comes out and dresses it up to make it look like the original stuff, then, you know, Capcom's got to look at and be like, damn, we should just go back to the retro style. The old 2d fighter scott. I mean, why not? Why. Why haven't we decided to do that yet? It's. It's beyond me. That hasn't happened. So I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, it's all. It's all money. It's all Disney money now. Yeah. Stop making things 3d. Disney. Leave it alone. It's fine. If it's 2d, it's okay, you know.

But 3D is okay because, I mean, like, guilty gear strive, I keep telling you guys, looks amazing. It's technically a 3d engine. I mean, it's definitely a 2d fighting game. You wouldn't know it's 3d. But behind the scenes is the 3d models and stuff, and it looks amazing. But, like, arc system works does amazing work with their. Their models. They look really good. So I don't know. Just hire those guys. Yeah.

All right, well, I think. I mean, we talked longer than I thought we would. Char, is anything you want to shout out, anything that you've been playing or you're streaming lately?

No, I. Yeah, we've been slammed. Go to California and celebrate my niece's wedding, which was fun. So we had to blow. We had a shotgun down there and do a little blitzkrieg down there back and then work. Just work, work, work. I'm gonna try and start quantum break this weekend, get back onto the streaming circuit and play a little bit of that. But it's gonna just be kind of off and on stuff. You guys and your simulation talk two weeks ago had me playing some more truck sim and kind of messing around with the simulators that I got, which is always fun. And I've been playing a lot of silent Hill two, my off time on my steam deck, the original for PS two. And I'm very much looking forward to in two weeks, the remake comes out and I'll be playing that quick. Yeah, it's going to be October. I want to say fifth or 7th or so, like the first week of October. So I'm eyeballing that. I've heard, I've heard mixed reviews about it, a lot of them positive, a lot of the negative. But I'm such a fanboy for Silent Hill two that I think I'm probably going to look past any of the problems that anybody that has never played it before will look at.

So, yeah, I know we talked about silent two a long time ago. I remember because Wolf talked about the ending with the dog as one of the Easter endings. I'm curious if they had that kind of humor in the remake. I talked about that one. That seems to be a good. I hope that game is good. Like I've never played, though I played the first one, I haven't played the rest of the franchise. I'm curious with the new one to see how it does. I hope it does well.

I will. I'll be your silent who to remake correspondent. Not a problem. And you can actually, if you buy, I think if you pre order it and get the special edition, you get the dog hat or helmet to put on your head so you can look like the dog while you're running around. It's on steam. But yeah, I'll be, I'll be picking that up and hopefully here in a couple weeks and firing that up. Give it a shot. Otherwise, I've just been trying to fill the, the elden ring size hole in my heart here.

Nice t shirts. Thank you. And, uh, you know, just trying to find something that's as challenging as. As the ring was. That's about it. Celebrating my. My non nerfed battle of consort redont. Thank you very much. Square or square? Thank you very much. I can't be a thing. Don't do that to me because I beat post patch millennia. So I mean, my. My suffering is just as valid. Thank you very much. I won't take away from anybody's fucking that shit regardless.

Yeah, um, well, for me, I've. I'm not going to talk about Warframe on this podcast anymore. I've done that before in previous years, although I'm getting heavy into it again. The game I'm going to shut out because I don't think we'll be able to do an episode on it because I don't think anybody on the crew is actually interested in this like I am. It's, uh, uf. UFO 50 got released this week. And it's like. I think it's like $24 american and it's basically a. It's inspired by early NES games, right? Think of like when you're a kid and you had the. The NES and you had that one friend who had the 52 and one cart, but imagine that. But good. It's 50 games in one compilation. It's a bunch. A bunch of indie developers from the last seven years working on their own individual games, and they put together a package of a compilation of games for like a fake made up system. And there's like little bit of fake lore bits and characters and it's. It's a really neat package. But the games aren't small. Like, they are much more fleshed out than you would think. To the point where I could probably spend 10 hours on just one of these 50 games on its own. And for $24, it's. It's a pretty good value. So there's also hidden secrets and other. Other cool stuff. I don't know, I might talk about a game of the year time. We'll see if it holds up. I know I say that every other week that it's game of the year, but this is definitely one to watch. If you have any interest in indie games, if you have any interest for NES and particularly hard NES games, because a lot of these games are hard as hell enough that I wish they had a DLC for game genie or something. It's stupid hard in some spots, but it's definitely a fun compilation. So go look up UFO 50. Maybe we'll talk about an episode in the future, but we'll see, this looks cool.

This really does look cool. I'm watching the videos that Jake's talking about. You can find it on Steam. It. It looks like classic NES games. Like, you can easily. You could easily have told me. Yeah, this is a classic in the S, but it's got. It's got that indie flair. You know, it's got golfing games and like a baseball looking game. Some like, fighting, beat em up games, and then what looks like, like a dodgeball type game, some dungeon crawlers, rpg style stuff. There's some really cool things in this game that would. I would be interested to play just. Just to kind of screw around the house, you know? I mean, like, if I can't think of anything to play, it's the new Bellatro, right? I'm just going to sit there. I'm going to play some of the UF 50 because I can't think of anything else to grab. This looks cool. This looks really neat.

And like the fake universe they've invented. They even have sequels to games in there. So there's one game called Campanella, and then they have Campanella two and Campanella three, although it's not as good as the second one because they went 3d with this one. Like, it's. It's neat what they did. It really is something special. Like, it, like, I jokingly say the action 52, which is, you know, legacy awful pirated cartridge against the NES, but it's like that style. But the games are all solid. Like, they really are. And like, like you said, everything from dungeon crawlers to shoot em ups to everything. It's just there's even like a robo rally inspired game in there, which is at the left field for me. I remember playing.

It looks like there's a point and click adventure in here, too. I mean, there is. Yeah. In the style of like a horror game, like Shadowgate or something. Like it's. It's. It's interesting how much depth there is to these games. Like, it's. I think this was in the development for eight years, I think. And it shows, like, there's a lot of work it went into this. This is cool. Pretty cool. Would recommend. Would recommend.

Yep. All right, if you're listening to this episode, please drop us a review on your favorite podcast app. Or if you're watching here on YouTube, we appreciate if you drop us a follow or a like does help us with the algorithm and so folks can find us. You can watch our videos on YouTube at press b two cancel. Or you can, of course, listen to the audio episode on Mondays anywhere. You listen to podcasts from Apple podcasts to Spotify Amazon or anywhere else. Or of course, you can find all of our [email protected]. or pressbe.org dot. All right, I think that's it, everybody. Have a great and wonderful week.

Berserker barrage.