Video Game Review: Marvel Vs Capcom 2 (PSN)

For the entire month of February, work has sucked. Sure, I’m glad that I still have a job with the way the economy has been brutalized for the past couple of years, but surely there’s a limit to how much of a pounding a corporation can lay into an employee. I can’t complain to the folks because they’ll give you the old “Well, in my day” spiel. I can’t complain to the Doc because she’s witnessed months where my job has been cake while hers has been a more consistent pain in the backside. So what do I do for an outlet? Why, I throw down in fisticuffs with Spiderman, a mummy, and a giant Mexican cactus.

Confused?

I just described a 3-man team I faced off against in Marvel Vs Capcom 2, which I purchased through the Playstation Network when it was on sale for 50% off (paid $7.49, regular price $14.99). It was a close fight as I had never played with my combination of characters at the time (Cyclops from the X-Men, Megaman, and a cat-girl) but I was able to pull off a wicked super combo type move and basically blasted the cactus back to Mexico.

Down to its core, this game is a 2-D fighter, like Street Fighter or the King of Fighters games, and because this game is basically a port of the arcade game that debuted around 2000, the graphics are mind blowing to today’s standards. But they get the job done. The backgrounds are cool moving 3-D scenes and even though the fighters are in 2-D, their special attacks and movements are not hurt by the graphical limitations. Since the game was created in 2000, when widescreen TVs weren’t as common as they are today, the game does give you the option to put of letter boxes on of the sides to make the screen square or you can have the boxes removed and play the game in widescreen glory. The only drawback I saw with going to widescreen is that some of the graphics get cut off, or more likely, just start to pop in where the squared screen would have started. Minor visual mistake at worst.

In my opinion, the graphics are not its strong-point, but that’s like saying Mickey Mantle isn’t the greatest baseball player ever (probably true, but not a bad player to have anyway). The strong point for this game is its character roster of 56 playable fighters. That’s right, 56! Sure, Tekken 6 came out a while ago and boasts a roster that could fill a football stadium, getting 56 characters in a downloadable game is just incredible. And unlike the Tekken 6 roster, most of the characters in MvsC2 are recognizable due to affiliations outside of the game, like Wolverine, Ironman, or the Hulk. The Marvel side is filled with the A-list of favorites. The Capcom side is a little bit of a head scratcher to me, maybe because I don’t play enough Capcom games outside of Street Fighter, but it was cool to see characters outside of Street Fighter be included like Jill Valentine from Resident Evil.

I heard there was a story about how the two universes got mashed together, but I’ve been spending so much time in the 3 vs. 3 battles and seeing what kinds of super combos I can get, I haven’t done much searching for that.

A cool aspect of the game is the online multiplayer, which I basically get spanked at and thrown to the curb, but it’s entertaining to see how well I can fare. I can beat a 40-year-old man, but I’m embarrassed and sent home crying by a 12-year-old girl scout. There is no way I can truly tell who I’m playing, but if they have the headsets, I can I hear them talk and that’s what I gather for what I heard.

This game is fun and easy to just pick up the controller and start mashing buttons. At the price I got it, definitely worth it. Might be a little questionable for $15, but you could do far worse.

Overall: BUY IT