Retronauts - 651: Marvel vs. Capcom

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

With its recent re-release making the series available on all modern platforms, Diamond Feit, Kevin Bunch, and John Learned team up again to discuss the Marvel vs Capcom fighting franchise. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by the power of the printed word. This week in Retronauts, that's what I expected. Hello, welcome back to Retronauts and welcome back to the world of Marvel and Capcom and Marvel versus Capcom. That's right, we're doing a follow-up to episode 608, which was just a few months ago, but so much has changed since then. Back then, in the, well, the wistful days of early 2024, we wondered what could happen if Capcom actually went back to its archives and drug out all these licensed games from the 90s and let people play them for a change. And Capcom did.

Did they hear us? Did they make our dreams come true? I don't know. But what's more important is it's out there. They've released it already. They worked fast. So here we are today talking about Marvel versus Capcom, the actual Marvel versus Capcom games, as opposed to last time where we walked up to the edge and then stopped.

But today we're giving you that full release word choice. of Marvel Capcom content. Excellent. I'm your host, Diamond Fight. I'm not taking anyone for a ride today. Do not ask me for a ride today. Joining me in the great state of Ohio? Hi, I've John Lernet and I almost had a heart attack there.

Oh, calm myself, calm myself. And joining me in Maryland? Yeah, that's right. Okay. Hi, this is Kevin Bunch and my ROM infinites are awful. Shout out to the ROMA Infinite. Yes. Well, we're going to say the word infinite a lot during this podcast, because let's face it, we're talking about Marvel Capcom games, and a lot of characters have the power to punch or kick or bunt you into infinity.

That's just what they do. It's what we love about the series, truly. Well, as I believe we talked about last time, when one of these games is not broken enough, like it has some infinites but only a few, I believe our. panel agreed that that was undesirable. We want more infinites, not less. More broken, more better. Okay. All right. I don't want to put anyone's... All right. I don't put words in anyone's mouth. Okay, as long as we get consensus on that. So anyway, as I said, go back to 608 if you want to hear the run-up to all this stuff, because I know there's a lot of backstory, but we did the backstory and a whole other podcast. Please enjoy that one. Let's start off in 1998, a very good year,

with Marvel versus Capcom clash of superheroes and John I'll give credit to you you want to point out so yeah 1998 what's Marvel doing in 1998 I feel like they're they're alighted into the tunnel right things are looking up a little bit

no the opposite is happening from like the worst of the worst is going out here so this podcast is going to be very interesting in that like with every game that we go through it's going to be fun to sort of map the trajectory of Marvel's

fortunes because they were really careening toward bad, bad times. If you previously on Retronauts, it was a really kind of strange power difference between Capcom and Marvel at that point because Marvel was starting to kind of go through bad times as the collapse of the comic shop industry and the speculator market kind of boomed within comics. that really rippled out to the big two Marvel in D.C. in weird ways, but D.C. was and is still owned by Warner Brothers and has been for decades. So even though they weren't doing great, they still had that parachute of like a huge corporate backer behind them, whereas Marvel was just sort of marble. You know, they were on their own, even though they were the bigger of the players in the game. But they had made some bad deals and a lot of the, the, um, Non-comics branding stuff, just, you know, the animated series and things were doing fine, but that wasn't really enough to kind of keep the lights on. So the writing was on the wall. So by 98, Capcom was starting to sort of slide a little bit, especially at least the Street Fighter franchise was not in a very good place.

But they were still sort of doing better than Marvel. That was like barreling toward bankruptcy, which is something that we're going to talk about again in a second two. So really both of these brands. were not in a great state when Marvel v. Capcom 1 came out in 1998. We're still a couple of years away from the Fox X-Men movie, which will change the fortunes of a lot of these games, actually. The success of those movies and being owned in perpetuity by 20th Century Fox at the time is going to play into a lot of this conversation. But in 1998, if anything, both companies were starting to really feel the pinch financially, and in Marvel's case, things weren't looking good at all.

Yeah, Capcom really had, at this point, they were falling back on Resident Evil to sort of shore up their fortunes because they just got decimated by all the problems that were going on in the game industry in the mid-90s. You had all sorts of new technologies that they had to struggle to keep up with. You had the Japanese recession and suddenly got a very strong, yen, which meant that they couldn't make up their losses domestically, internationally very well. Like John said, Street Fighter, Fighting Games in general, like they sort of fell off of the zeitgeist in the mid-90s, like 95, 96.

So they had various factors working against them, but they had Resident Evil to keep them alive. And I think that's probably why they were in better shape than Marvel at this point. otherwise they both would have really been flailing. Yeah, and if it's 1998, that means Resident Evil 2 just came out after a lengthy delay. So during that delay, Capcom was very... But after the delay, you know, after the game came out, they sold 5 million copies. Capcom was very...

So they were definitely feeling the love at that point. By the time this game comes out. And we're still a year away from a Dreamcast and two years away from a PlayStation 2. So, like, everyone is really sort of looking forward to what that next generation is going to be. And in Capcom's case, anyway, like, there was a pretty good refresh on their end for a lot of their brands. And, like, this is pre-Devil May Cry. So, yeah, things were in a very weird place in the video game industry, period, because we're in that sort of, like, really high moment of, like, Final Fantasy 7 did really well in the PlayStation 1. But arcades are definitely are not what they were in America.

So the PlayStation 1 is doing very well. But, like, the industry is already sort of looking ahead to what that next step is going to be. And, yeah, with arcade games being in the state that they were in, Street Fighter 3, New Generation did really badly for Capcom. It was a pretty big flop for them. Alpha 3 was, was that in 99? Was that 908? Alpha 3 was 98, I think. 98?

Yeah, that was not. That was not really a big hit in arcades. Right. At least in the U.S. It wasn't a flop like New Generation was, but I don't recall it, you know, being huge. hugely popular until it came out on console. Yeah, we're in a weird period. That's what we're getting.

Yeah. And just an addendum, John, as you mentioned, Dreamcast. Dreamcast is out in Japan by years end. So Dreamcast is late 98 in Japan. Big, you know, the 99 release in America, of course, is a big deal. But that means by this point, 1998, Capcom is already looking at, if not actively making Dreamcast games and figuring out what they can do for Dreamcast. I'm sure at some point they're deciding, oh,

geez, do we want a Resident Evil on the Dreamcast? Which one do we want? Is it a new game? You know, because, you know, two just came out, like, okay, well, two sold bangers. And I think, I think by years then they greenlight, like five different Resident Evil games. So, certainly one of them ends up being Code Veronica. So...

It was a very Capcom move. This one works. Make tons of them. Yes. Hey, it worked for Mega Man, right? Until I didn't. Works for Street Fighter until I didn't. But anyway, here in Arcades, never mind the home consoles for now. Here in Arcades, the CPS System 2. We have Marvel Capcom 2, and we have Alpha 3. I think they're both pretty sure

they're both 98. And what I like about this is they've finally given up on the whole specificity thing. It's like, okay, we don't need X-Men, we don't need superheroes, we don't need Street Fighter, it is just, here is the Marvel company, here is the Capcom company, here are our toys, let's bang them together. Just go for it, man. And it, I think it works. I think it worked, like, for me, like, when I saw it in arcades, it's like, oh, oh, yes, yes, this is what I want. Absolutely. Yes, give me, hear my coins. Please, take my money. Yeah, throwing Mega Man in the roster, which, you know, we should talk about the roster at some point, really sold this on me when I was my first experienced it. And I think it was 99, actually. I think the first time I played this was the Dreamcast home port.

But as soon as I saw that character, I'm like, oh, shoot, I got Street Fighter and I got my boy from the Mega Man games. I'm in. Your boy from the Mega Man games, Mega Man? Yeah. Okay. You're man from the Mega Man games. Listen, I'm very straightforward here. Knows what he likes.

Yeah. But as with previous games, we're still doing two-on-two. We're still doing free-swapping, whatever you want. That's happening still. You can bring in both your characters, both characters, do you see. super moves. What's new this time around is you can have both your characters on screen at the

same time. And if you're very adept, you can have them do different stuff and maybe even surround an opponent and get the drop on them and do all kinds of wackiness. And also, it comes with a very great screen, you know, which for me is an incredible Hulk viewer as a kid.

I was very into this thing where the two characters profiles slammed together on the screen. So, you know, you'll have like Hulk and Venom or Spy Iron Man and Venom, or just, you know, Mega Man and you or whatever. Like, they fit together, like, Legos, and it's just, it's really funny. And then just honor chaos. Because, of course, both players can do it at the same time.

So, in theory, you can have four characters rumbling about all, you know, all against each other. Just madness. I feel like those, those portraits are very iconic because I've seen so many people just do, like, send-ups of those with all sorts of characters who weren't in this game. Yeah. And they look really cool. They're very well-done art. Who is the artist on this one? Kina Nishimura did a couple of the key images.

She is the goat. Yeah, she is the goat. Akiman, I think, did the, I think he did the famous one where all the characters are sort of, like, in profile looking at each other. I think that's Akiman. But I want to say that, like, this is sort of the end of that sort of iconic run, that that period of Capcom fighting game art that people still sort of refer back to and do send-ups of what, like what you were talking about. I really like the cover art and the poster art for Marvel versus Capcom, too, but it's

not really sort of like stuck in the imagination of people like the art for this game was. And we're still talking about in fighting game, in modern fighting game terms, this is a really relatively small cast. Yes. But at the time, I mean, it was still, it was, it was a, probably average maybe a little less than average size cast so it wasn't unheard of to have I mean this many characters but having them all kind of clumped together in such a way and in such a dynamic way in some of the art that that's really stuck with people for a long,

long time and I still love looking at that stuff. I can't get enough of it. Yeah, if we do a quick rundown of the cast, there are only 15 characters, which is, you know, a little less than the earlier games, but some of these sprites are brand new. You know, not everything is, it's not all recycled content like the last game we talked about. They have some new sprites here. They certainly have a lot of new backgrounds and new music. So we've got Chunli, of course. We got you, of course. We got Zangif, okay?

We got Morgan, sure. We've got Captain Commando, and he's got some of his squadmates with him for like a special assist. We've got Mega Man. We've got Strider, hear you, which is definitely kind of a weird pull at the time. However, you know, this is 1988. You know, a year from now, Strider will be back in Strider 2, which will be an arcade release and a home release, and I think everyone will suddenly say, hey, remember Strider? Strider's cool.

Because in this game, Strider is really cool. Yeah, I think this is where Strider hit his stride, if you will. Mm, wop, wop, wop, wow. First Strider games from, what, 89, and then nothing other than the really awful European sequels that no one wants to think about. So really, this was a deep cut, and they pulled him from obscurity and made him seem like the most badass ninja that's ever been in a video game. And certainly this look.

This look would be his look going forward with the big scarf. You know, he did not have a scarf in 89. He didn't. No, no scarf. I want to say that this was like the canary and the coal mine. Like, if people really connect to Strider in this game, okay, let's make some more strider games. Maybe I think that this was sort of the beginning of something to see if people were

really going to be interested. It's a classic Capcom test. It is. Old thing. You like this old thing? We'll give you more of it. Otherwise, we forget. We forget.

Who's that, Strider? We don't know her. Spider-Man back, of course. Jin Sal Tomé, definitely a big, a strange poll, because that's Cyberbots, right? Which, Cyberbots, was Cyberbots ever released in America or just like a very limited release? It came out over here. I think it was on PS1 at the very least. I don't remember if it got an arcade release. I think it did.

Because I remember seeing Dev a lot in Puzzle Fighter and her win quotes, like, what do you mean? You don't know who I am? You know, Cyberbots was very popular. And, like, that was the joke to me. He was like, oh, I've never heard of that game. But this is not Dev a lot. It's Jin Sal Tome. It's a very strange cut because, like, cyberbots is a game where they're fighting in giant robots.

And here he, like, summons the robot for super moves and such. But, like, he's just a guy fighting on foot. And, I mean, he's cool. He's a super cool character, super cool design. I had a friend from the arcade back in the day, and she loved picking in because you could bash the button and he would do his taunt where he takes off all his clothes and just starts rubbing himself with the towel

and she thought that was great, especially if you kept mashing it, he'd just keep going until he caught himself on fire. Yes, this is a man with burning passion, we should say. He's got a lot of heat in his body. He's ready to release that heat. He's Genki. He's Genki. If you, like, matched up

Ryu with Batsu from rival schools and made him a MEC pilot, this is who we're talking about. Captain America is back. Venom, definitely a big pull to have Venom in the game, because by this point, Venom is a very well-known character, I think, to even, even, like, peripheral Marvel fans

who don't read comics, that by now they've seen Venom, probably in other video games at the very least, or maybe the Spider-Man cartoon on Fox. Like, Venom's out there. Everyone knows Venom, so to have him in the game, big deal. And he's not just Spider-Man a different color. It is a new sprite, very different, plays different, God of, he's very fluid, he's got very, like, splashy moves, like literally splashing.

Hulk. Hulk is there. People, everyone knows Hulk. Gambits certainly, well, Gambits are existing, existing, right from earlier games. War Machine, I feel like the inclusion of War Machine is an indication of how people really didn't care about Iron Man before 2008, because they already had Iron Man. Like, Iron Man is in a bunch of earlier games, but they decided, you know what, we're going to take Iron Man and we're going to swap him out for War Machine, by which I mean, we're going to color him differently. We're a calm War Machine, we're giving basically one new move which launches missiles. Otherwise, it's basically Iron Man in MC1, MVC1.

That changes in future games. But for now, War Machine is here. Welcome to War Machine. And Wolverine. Of course, Wolverine. Got to have Wolverine. Got to have Wolverine. I think War Machine might have been a Marvel mandate, personally, because, like, at the time,

they were really trying to push War Machine as a big new hero around this period. it, like, they were giving him a new book, his own book. They threw a lot of really good talent at the books that they were giving War Machine and the appearances that he was in, like, really well-known artists and stuff like that. I don't know that for sure, but just it, the timing seems to line up, so that's my head canon. This was when Venom was really taking off, too. So I wouldn't be surprised if he was a request from Marvel as well. The Venom Sprite is really incredible.

It looks. Yeah, they put a lot of work into it. it just like all the moving parts yeah yeah you mentioned a couple times last time uh kevin like spiral and schumegorath were basically just the the capcom artists kind of flexing and that's what venom sort of feels like to me too yes lots of moves where he can extend his sort of you know symbiote slime whatever we want to call it like across the screen um webs he can shoot out that just cover the entire screen really a big a big big flashy character funny to look at. Now, you'll notice, I didn't say the words, Ken or Akuma. But they're in the game,

sort of, because Ryu is now your all-purpose Shodokan guy. So for the cost of one super move, you can turn you into his cohorts. So he'll change colors. His geek, his geek color will change, and then he will just do Ken moves, or he'll do Akima moves. Like, you, that's your choice. So by taking those characters out, they sort of left their moves in. And I kind of wish more games would do this, because I don't know. I mean, I guess now these days, the characters do have a little more variety, but in the 90s, they weren't that different. So in games that had very limited, you know, resources, and certainly memory still costs a lot of money, especially arcade games. I was happy to see that change. Like, oh, you want to have, you want to do what you

or can or come out? Okay, just pick this one guy and you get the total package. Yeah, it was a great idea. And if they'd set it up so, like, you could start as one of them, I think it would I really think that should have stuck more, but what are you going to do? I love this. I remember reading about this before the game came out, and I'm like, that is such a good idea. Why did it take so long for us to do something like that? And I think, like, you know, Marvel Superheroes versus Capcom could have done this and added another character in the place of either Ken, or of Ken, at least.

And that would have made the game a little bit more interesting to me, I guess. But, no, I really like this idea. Also, rounding out the characters, you have hidden characters who are mostly pallet swaps, but not all of them. We've got a orange Hulk who did not exist at that point, but later on there would be an orange Hulk. Officially, he is Hulk, Marvel Superheroes version, which means he doesn't have the Super Armor. I guess he's a little bit faster, but not that much faster, I don't think. He can sort of combo a lot easier, but without the Super armor, why would you pick him? Yeah, it's just a big target.

at that. Yeah. We have Hyper Armor War Machine, who is gold-colored, and like the name suggests, he has hyper-armor. He's got super armor. He actually can't block. If you play us, he cannot block. But he's very powerful because he's got the hyper-armor and because he's got such, you

know, like War Machine, a lot of other Iron Man's in later games, he can do so much damage in such a hurry. He's very dangerous. We have, again, officially high-speed venom, who is red. people said, oh, red, like carnage? Or other people said, oh, you mean like, phage? Like, Real Marvel Sicko said, oh, you mean like phage? But he's just, you know, he's a little faster version of Venom. So I guess they made him, you know, red. He's also, like, just insanely good in this game. Like, Venom was not meant to be that fast, but here he is. I think he has

a two-button infinite, just like off the ground, I believe. I'm pretty sure. That's true. Yeah. Wait, there's an infinite in this game? I know. I'm shocked. Whoa. Take it easy. It's an easy one to find, I've been told. Roll. Roll's unique sprite, but let's be, you know, as Mega Man's sister, she has a lot of similar attacks to Mega Man and use some vehicles. But they actually made a unique Roll Sprite, which is very nice. She has a broom, you know, good for her, keeping the place clean. We have Shadow Lady, who is basically dark Chunli, but they give her a lot more tools to play with, like beam attacks and drill attacks, and she will bow to you and fire a bunch of missiles.

Let's not ask where the missiles come from. We don't know. We don't want to know. We don't want to No. She's got missiles. Let's just accept that for who she is. I like that they gave her the drill that Apocalypse had in the previous games. It's like, that's a choice. And fresh off the introduction of Lilith in Vampire's Savior in 97, you've got Red Morgan, who's essentially Lilith. She's got some different moves. But basically, it's, you know, it's Lilith light, if you will, Lilith adjacent. Not a little sprite, but, you know, same Morgan Sprite, same pixels. just new colors and some more hearts. I think that's interesting because this is really Morgan's first appearance outside of the Darkstalkers games, right? With the sprite that they're going to use it for a million more games. But she's very much based on sort of like her ending from, or I guess Lilith's ending from a vampire savior where the two of them like merge and she gets her full power.

because all of her fireballs are like the, the X versions from Vampire Savior. You know, her moves are supposed to be super powerful. She's got her beam attacks. And, yeah, having this, like, alternate Lilith form is very interesting because those attacks also seem a little improved upon from Vampire Savior as well. And I understand, like, technically speaking, that's just to keep her up with the Marvel characters. We're shooting beams and everything everywhere. but I think, you know, just storyline-wise, canonically, I think it also works really well. It's a good fit for her, but yes, as, you know, as discussed in earlier games, you know,

when they brought out all the alpha crew, like all of a sudden everyone's, everyone's moves just got giant size. So it makes sense to give her bigger fireballs, larger beams. But there was some, actually that some fan art just recently went around suggesting that because Morgan summons giant beam attacks and gives us a jet pack, she's actually just a big, like, Gundam nerd. So there was a nice... There was a nice sketch going around of Morgan is going out shopping with glasses on and a big hoodie and some nice relaxed pants and just going shopping for plastic models. I thought that was very funny.

Good, good artwork there. Do they both have a shingokasatsu? She has her, like, beat-em-up move that she had from the original dark suckers. I mean, it's not quite a shingokasatsu, but it's like, it's a short range, like, she's going to beat you up. Like, she summons a double, and they both do a combo on you. It's a darkness illusion, I think it's called. I wish the viewers could see my excellent finger look here to demonstrate how two Morgans punch and kick you at the same time. It's like you're making Marionette's dance over there.

You know, they say that print is dead, but someone forgot to tell all the folks at Old School Gamer that that's the case. Old School Gamer has been running for years, documenting and celebrating video games, arcade games, computer games, and more, spanning from the 1970s through the 90s. Each issue is packed with interviews with and articles by the people who were there making the games. In addition to columns, retrospectives, and reviews, and more, that dive into the ways that people celebrate the early days of video games. But I hear your skepticism. You've bought into the hype that print is dead. Well, the good news is that old-school gamer is also digital,

and every issue also comes in a free digital version. They get you access to the first half of that issue, so you can check it out and see for yourself, and realize that what you really want is the full paid print and digital companion version. That gets you six issues a year, each containing 72 pages or more, of a print magazine about video games. If you're old enough to remember all these old games that are being covered, you're old enough to remember what it was like to swing by the newsstand

and browse through the magazines like Game Informer, EGM, OPM, and more. Old School Gamer magazine tries to evoke that spirit, while also embracing the digital preferences of today's readers. So check it out at old schoolgamer.com. Or better yet, go to old schoolgamer.com slash retronauts, where there's a special offer available. Retronauts listeners can subscribe to the magazine by the end of November and receive a bonus issue.

That includes the most recent issue of the magazine, which has a column by a guy named Jeremy Parrish, talking about old NES and Famicom games. That alone, in my opinion, is worth the price of admission, but you also get six more issues, which will also contain columns by me. That's a total of seven issues of Old School Gamer plus more words by Jeremy Parrish. Just go to old schoolgamer.com slash retronauts and get ready to relive the old days of games and print about games. Speaking of Marinettes and assist characters, we have special partners. This is a new feature where they decided, you know what?

Two characters is good, but what if we have a third semi-present character who just shows up and does one thing? And this is 98, so this is an advance of K-O-F striker system, which will come to 99. And also what's advice about this is, since the character only comes in and does one thing, it's not that many frames of animation, so they get a little weird. You know, of course, they go back, they call back to some characters who didn't make the cut, like Cyclops and Magneto and Colossus and Iceman, but they also throw in new characters, or at least, new to the series, like Arthur from Goals and Ghosts, shows up and throws a bunch of, like, you know, javelins, devilot. I said Devilat. Devilot's in the game. She shows up and explodes.

Yeah, you got Anita from, you know, Dark Star Trek Night Warriors. You've got some, the Tompoo, the Kung Fu ladies from Strider. You got Unknown Soldier from Forgotten Worlds. Like, they're really doing some flexing here. Again, going back to the past and having characters just show up and do, you know, a quick thing. The guy from Three Wonders. Three Wonders. Raise your hand. Three Wonders fans. Raise your hands out there.

I was today years old when I learned where Lou came from because I had no idea. I like Saki here from Quiz Nunilo Nanairo Dreams, who became like an actual character in Totsidoko versus Capcom. A good one, yeah. She's a pretty good assist in this one, like not an amazing one, but pretty good. She had a really easy, like, button code if you just wanted to pick her. Because, yeah, all of these are like semi-random, but if you hold down a button combination, when you pick your characters, you'll always get like the same one for whatever given combo. And hers, I think, was just heavy punch or something. Yeah.

So I got her a lot. And these are finite, too. You can't just, like, call them in whenever they're ready. Like, you've got maybe six times per match of using Colossus, who is kind of the preferred pick for a lot of people because he just does his sort of like rushing shoulder charge. charge, you know, armor and shoulder charge. So, yeah, he's on the screen for a long time. For a long time, yeah. He's got a pretty wide hitbox, too.

So he'll put out, he'll find you. But, yeah, you can't just, like, use them willy-nilly. You have to at least sort of plan how often you want to hit the Colossus button. Or at least... I think Iceman was really good, too, wasn't he? Yeah, because it's all, it's just the... Oh, it's the big boulder, right? Yeah, he's dropping, like, a bunch of blocks of ice from the sky.

Yeah. locks down a lot of the screen. I always like Jubilee, but she kind of sucked. That's the thing. Like, I think a lot of these are awesome deep cuts, like, you know, legendary wings and Forgotten Worlds. It's cool for, like, old nerds like us, but it sucks when they also suck. So nothing you can do about it, pick Cyclops or Colossus or whatever.

My favorite was that they had U.S. agent in here. You do? And Cap is right there. And they had, like, a running gag in my friend group because someone went down, like, this giant wind streak using the U.S. Agent assist. And we just came away like, all right, I guess U.S. agent's just like the best character in the game because

no one can beat him. And he actually sucks, but it's really funny. And now that just is how I associate U.S. agent in my head. And we're like, oh, he's someone who should suck. But, you know, he went on a tear. And we're recorded this in 2024. So isn't U.S. agent coming

back in the next, the Thunderbolts movie? That's... Yeah. Right? They had the disgrace, Captain America. and now it's going to be U.S. agent, so they're following the comic books a little bit, but they're doing a different thing, and, well, whatever, we need to get in the Marvel movies right now. But U.S. Agent, relevant again in the 21st century. Who would have saw that coming? How? How? Speaking of 90s characters we don't talk about anymore, who wants to explain onslaught to the children? Anyone? I'm going to throw that one to John. Although, you know, they did set up a little bit of an onslaught story in X-Men 90s. So maybe folks were going to do it. Maybe folks are prized.

I thought they were going to whip that out. Yeah. I thought they were going to whip that out. I was surprised that they didn't go all for it. But like we already know more X-Men 97 is coming. So yeah. Go ahead, John. Set us up for X-Men 97 part two.

Well, it's funny that we're bringing up X-Meny-7 because the last time we recorded a podcast, it was not quite before that show debuted. And all of us are like, this is a huge mistake. Why is Marvel spending money on this? And it turned out to be really awesome. Yeah, just so much better than we all expected. it to be. But, all right, I'm going to preface this by saying that I was getting out of comics kind of at the point where this happened, but I had worked in a comic book shop when I was in

high school when onslaught was happening. So let me do my best to summon that. So there was a massive crossover across all the X-Men books. And I want to say that this was like 96, 97 around that time. And there were many, many, many X-Men books at that point. where Professor X's son, Legion, sort of fused on, there's going to be somebody in the comments. It's just going to, like, rake me over the colds for this. But, like, Professor X's, less is more, you know? Sort of, yeah, yeah, we're going to minimize this.

Kind of fuses together, Professor X and Magneto's psyches and creates this Uber monster, universe destroying being named Onslaught. And this was at a point where many. Marvel fans were like, we've had enough of this kind of bullshit. And so, like, this is another reason the, even the X-Men books were just not doing very well at this point because, like, people were really sick of, of big crossovers in the comics because, I mean, if you want to read all the stories, you're buying, like, five or six or 10 extra books every month, if not more.

It was really not a good storyline. I don't think it's really got a lot of, like, long-term fans, but if it's coming back to, for X-Men 97, who the hell knows? But yeah, so somehow, after this was all over and was not really that big of a success, from what I recall, this is what Capcom used as their successive ultra boss past apocalypse. But I guess from a gameplay standpoint, and if you're going to one up apocalypse, it does kind of make sense because it's such a large, large enemy to fight. It starts as a small one and gets to be a huge cosmic one. it kind of fits. It's just one of those things that, in hindsight, I mean, we're, again, to keep referring back to the last episode, although it's awesome and you should listen to it.

But we were talking about how you shouldn't look at certain Marvel characters' designs at the point where Marvel superheroes versus Street Fighter came out. And that is this, that is more of this. It's tough to sort of go back to those Marvel comics at that point and accept their merits. but, like, this is something that I think Capcom just, like, backed themselves into a corner to use and, like, all right, we've got to do something bigger than Apocalypse. We did a cyber raccoon and it didn't really... I mean, it was a smaller scale, so we got to go big.

We're Marvel versus Capcom, and yes, I'm sorry, everybody. I had to bore you with that. You know, at least he looks cool. You kind of get an onslaught that. His sprite is cool. And, you know, the concept is interesting. I understand why they've brought him back a few times in the comics since this.

Why, he'll probably be an X-Men 97 at some point. Yeah, X-Men 97 kind of, like, does their best to sort of, like, just choose major stories and do, like, one episode of it, of it. And I think this is a foregone conclusion at this point. You know what? If they can salvage Madeline Pryor, I'm sure they can salvage John Slot. Right. Anyway, the only thing we get on screen is a very tall, you know, if you're not, if you're not in on the comics, you'd think, oh, it looks like Magneto, because it does look like, you know, it's got, it's got red and purple armor, but like, imagine, you know, more shoulder pads. No, no, more shoulder pads.

All of all of all the soldier pads. Yes. There's no Mo Man saying that's too big. No, Molyman does not exist. We're going big, we're going bigger. And he just kind of sits there a little bit. He has big beam attacks. He's got like Magneto attacks. He can teleport around a little bit. Onslaught can sort of back out and summon another character to fight you for a little bit. It's usually a clone of you. Just for a few seconds, just like wear you down a little bit. And kind of like the general strategy in this phase is like, you want to try to block a lot and you want to try to get hits when you can. Because Onslaught is basically constantly armored. Like, you can't really loosen them up. You can't really do a combo. Like, if he wants to attack you when you hit him first, he's going to hit you out of whatever you're doing. As I recall, I think Mega Man, Megaman, such a tiny sprite. I think the down fierce attack is just a projectile attack, so you can just spam that and just shoot him to death and win round one easy with Mega Man. Or I think you could turn into the rush car because I'm pretty sure he's invincible during his rush car and get all the hits in.

Yeah, if you build it with Super, yeah, you can do that one too and just run over on. lot with your little car. But that's only round one. Because round two, Onslaught says, all right, the gloves are off. My helmet is off. I've got a big scary face now. And I am now a giant sprite that is too big defender of the screen. So Onslaught is now flying around the screen, doing lots of giant beam attacks.

And it's kind of like, yeah, again, it's a level up from Apocalypse in the earlier games, except Apocalypse was always a ground level, whereas Onslaught is literally flying around the screen. So you're going to do super jumps to catch him in the air. if you've got a ground-based super good luck, wait from to come down, I guess. Otherwise, you may be out of luck, sorry. Should have brought a beam. Should have brought a beam. Yep.

Bring a beam to an onslaught fight. It's good advice for all these Marvel games, honestly. Right. All these bosses. Bring a beam. Bring somebody to shoot stuff. I just think that this is not that so far removed from the apocalypse fight from before that I've never really thought that this.

This was such a great ending, but, like, I mean, the game is so good even beyond this that Onslaught gets a pass here. Yeah, like, the stages are super colorful and they're all, like, themed on the different characters, the music's, the covers of all the character themes are really good. Role has, like, a whole vocal theme song when she comes out, which is a really cute touch that they ended up using, again, when she shows up in Tatsunoko versus Capcom. But, yeah, the presentation of this game is like, for me, it's its peak Marvel crossovers with Capcom. I agree.

I did a great job with it. I really love the Spider-Man stage and that, like, you're fighting on the top of two buildings, and the gap between the building is a webbing that Spider-Man had put there ahead of time. So when you walk over it, it can't, I mean, it doesn't really affect your character movement, but it, like, boings a little bit. And I always thought that was a great touch. Mm-hmm. Jeez, I guess this is 98.

So I think it's the same year that the Jojo fighter comes out, and that also has a building top with some webbing on it. Interesting. Hmm. Intrigan. Capcom was cooking up buildings. Everything is Jojo. I do like the fact that so much the characters have interplay,

different teams have different quotes together. Indeed, this is the center point of the Spider-Man Morgan coupling online, because if you pick them together, Spider-Man makes some joke about, oh, don't tell MJ I'm out late or whatever. And so people to this day, people are drawing art of Spider-Man and Morgan hanging out together or even dating, which is just, you know, just cute, you know, it's fun. No harm. No harm there. They're both adults.

I love the concept of them as just, like, buddies going out for, like, a burger or whatever after the fight. You know, Morgan is just this, like, nerdy goblin is a very fun characterization that Capcom should just embrace. Let her be a gremlin. They shot for gunplow together. Yeah. Sure. why not? This still fits. It all fits together. Uh-huh. I mean, she's buying because

he's Spider-Man doesn't have any money. That's true. You know, he's along for moral support. I really love, I don't know all the endings to buy heart, but I know that if you beat the game with Mega Man, you get a really perfect Mega Man style, you got screen, where he gets

the magnetic shockwave from an insult, he beat Onsult and got his weapon. And it's just a pitch perfect recreation of Mega Man stuff, like, oh, yes, that's good, yes. I think it's just, like, straight up the Mega Man 8, like, you got a sequence just with, like, the Marvel Capcom font. It's really cute. Beautiful. And he uses it, and it's crazy overpowered.

It's perfect. And I think in some home ports, I think you actually use it, I think. That sounds right. I think he does get to keep it in some of the home ports as an actual thing that you can unlock. It's been a while since I've loaded up on Dreamcast. I should check that. Well, there are two home ports or note we should mention right away. There's a PlayStation version and a Dreamcast version.

They're both out in Japan in 1999. I think the English PS1 version doesn't come out until 2000 because they probably waited to localize it. The PS version, though, not well received because, let's face it, this many sprites, this much memory. You can only fit so much into the data stream. So I think there's no swapping, right? No character swapping? I think you can character swap if you're both using the same teams, because I know that's how the older game. worked on this, and it's

not great. Yeah. It's kind of a big deal. Yeah. But the Dreamcast one's a great port. Yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty sure if that wasn't a launch game in the U.S., it was pretty close. I know it came out in Japan, like, right around my birthday.

So for my birthday in 99, my buddy brought his Japanese Dreamcast and a copy of Marvel One over, and we just played the crap out of that for like three hours. It was a great time. Awesome. Not great with the Dreamcast controller, but, you know, that's why you get the green goblins, right?

The age tech sticks. The best arcade stick ever produced. It's true. Also, we should point out the fact that in 2012, many years later, when Capcom tried to dig up their Marvel license again and refurbish it, they had a Marvel's Capcom Origins pack on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, which was a bundle of superheroes. and Marvel Capcom won. So it was one price. You get both these games, remastered, online play, you know,

rollback. Still the same old graphics, but, you know, higher resolution. It came out in 2012. It was the list of the next year, but if you bought them, you can still download them. I have two broken PS3s in my home, and if I got them working again, I could just play that game right now. I could do that,

but I can't because they're broken. Yeah, if I remember, this was the same group that did, like HD remix and a third strike online edition. So like they were one of the only development houses doing rollback net code at that time on retail games since that was a fairly new technology at the time. And I remember the online was pretty good for these.

It's just, you know, you could only buy it for about a year. Yeah, Iron Galaxy, I think, right? That sounds right. Yeah, I don't really think that this sold very well either. I think this is also a point where, Capcom was had put out or was about to put out the Darkstockers re-releases on PS3 and Xbox 362 again to see if they could drum up some interest in further stuff and didn't take as well you know they did the Marvel versus Capcom 2 re-release prior to this

and I think people were so shocked by that it sold really well but I think that you know the MVC origins thing was a clear indicator that you know the interest was only for maybe this one game and not for future stuff or even other games in the in the sub-series, which is sad. Again, the infamous Capcom test. It wasn't HD Remix they did. It was Darkstalker's Resurrection was the other one I was thinking of.

Right. Yeah, Backbone did HD Remix. Yes, which, you know, Dark Stalker's Resurrection was and Third Strike Online Edition were sort of the go-toes before the current ports. And I guess Third Strike might still be. I think people really like that version of the game. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to say yes, and we can move on. I know how Kevin hates for me to talk about third strike. You're off the hook. Oh, hello. I didn't see you there. My name's Stuart Jip. I'm the author of the book All Games Are Good, available through limited rungames.com. Now, normally, we charge a sort of regular price for this book, which I am very satisfied with. But to my great displeasure, it has been placed on a 25% discount for the next couple of

weeks, actually. Through November 27th, you'll be able to get a quarter, 25% of my book. I was not consulted about this, and I have to admit, I'm actually livid. The fact that Jeremy Parish's Nez works, that's right, Nez. Nezworks, 1985 through 1986, is also on sale, is immaterial. My book should be sold at full price. And, you know, if you do buy my book for 25% off, which is, of course, full of entertaining and interesting opinions about video games, then, frankly, I'm going to be furious. Well, yes, it is time. Let us graduate to the year 2000.

It's a new, new age of heroes, a new millennium. Capcom Marvel, Marvel versus Capcom 2, I should say. Now on Naomi, the brand new Naomi board. So we've got more power than ever before. It arrives early 2000. February 2000 in Japan in arcades and probably, I remember seeing it in America pretty early because I think they just imported a Japanese cabinet. That's my memory. At least, again, I lived in New York, so I had the advantage. But I would assume most places, if they could afford it,

would have gotten a Japanese cabinet right away because the anticipation was pretty high. I mean, I know when I heard about it. I was like, oh, yes, more mobile Capcom, especially when I saw the numbers, because we're doing Naomi here, memory isn't quite as expensive as it was in the past, so they decided, oh, we're bringing everybody back. We're getting the band back together. We're bringing them all back. Now, it's not everybody, of course. But in the 2000, you know, this is a time when Mugan already exists. Capcom definitely went for more is more. We need, we want more characters. We want to have as many possible characters. I believe the number is 56, which is a very impressive two-digit figure. That is like, that's like K-O-F-98 numbers, you

I think up to this point, it was the most characters in a fighting game. And I think even now, there's not very many that surpass 56 playable characters. Playable. I should put that in quote marks because we'll get into that a little more when we get to it. Yeah. And if you look at the roster, of course, most of these sprites are from older games. That's, you know, that's the whole point. We have all these sprites around.

Let's use them. There are a couple new ones, a couple newcomers we can point out. You know, we've got cable. Cable's certainly a 2000's choice, you know, let's be honest, very timely. Kind of the default character, I think, on some plate, like, when you start up the select screen, I think Cable is one of the default ones. He's like, he's an all-rounder guy. He's really powerful.

He's got a lot of beams, you know, very, very strong choice for beginners or experts or anyone, really. Yeah, Cable's a boss in this game. Mm-hmm. Tronbon, from the recent, you know, Mega Man Legends games, very popular character. She's got her little mech, very adorable. Hayato from Star Gladiator, definitely a surprise. It was a recent Capcom fighting game. They're like, oh, let's cross-promote, I guess.

I don't know. He's a very strange pick, but he's kind of cool looking in that, like, edgy 90s way. Maybe he was supposed to be the Strider stand in because Strider is noticeably absent from this game. No, he's here. Oh, is he in this one? Yeah. That's why you got Strider Doom is like, A whole famous team.

I'm going to keep my mouth shut and let you guys continue. No, it's writers here. We got Ruby Hart, Space Pirate. Yeah, she was, she's one of the original characters for this one, didn't she? Yeah. That's, yeah, that's Capcom. That's Capcom creation. Also, Living Cactus, Amingo from the Samba de Amingo games.

Amingo's so cool. I'm pretty sure if the top characters weren't, like, in this game, Amingo would be the boss because he has a lot of really fun stuff. I think looking back at this game, the one character most people do not remember at all is Marrow. And Marrow is a very 2000s Marvel type. That's what she grows her bones, right? She grows her bones and throws her bones. Right.

She's got too much bones in her? And why not? Yeah, this is, as 2000s X-Men comics go, this is the most 2000s X-Men comics character they could find. Yeah, and I don't, you almost never see her. in competitive play, like ever, ever, ever. So there's an interview with Arcadia magazine with the director and the producer

Nakai and Sudo. And they were saying that Merro and Cable were suggestions by a Capcom employee that was extremely well versed in American comics, which is probably Akimoto, who had a hand in almost all of the pre-Marvel versus Capcom

Marvel crossover games or the Capcom Marvel games. we should say. So it was his idea. Cable's not really that deep of a cut. Mero at the time kind of wasn't either. She was in the comics, but she's still, like, there are probably still more better known Marvel characters that they could have chosen.

I don't really get the Mero thing, but she is really distinct on screen, which in this game is pretty important because it moves at such a pace. You really want to, your eyes need to be able to track these kinds of characters. and she's got such a sort of bright color palette and distinct look to her that that was maybe a reasoning. But, yeah, I don't know, Mero, who, I don't get it. It's right up there with the Schumegorath pick from Marvel Superheroes. Also, very excited for me personally.

As a Resident Evil fan, I was elated, elated to see that Jill Valentine made the jump from 3D to 2D, and she shows up, and she brings zombies with her. She's got moves where she summons zombies and dogs. and just so happy to see her here. She's, you know, I think anime, Jill Valentine has seen it in this game is adorable. I think it's great. I wish more games took gruff and serious characters and gave him this kind of treatment, you know? I love it.

And she heals. It's a great sprite. She brings the herb with her. It's still kind of a rare thing in fighting games at that point. Native to the Arclay Mountains. I liked that they added in a both regular, like, adamantium, Wolverine and also Boneclaw Wolverine, who is basically just the same character, but faster and with less health somehow, because Wolverine already had barely any health. They only reason to have him here so you can do a double Wolverine team, I guess, but he's sure there.

Also a Marvel mandate, apparently, according to this Arcadia interview, it was a, you know, a Marvel put their foot down on this specifically. They wanted both Wolverines in the game. which is weird because like 2000 he already had his animantium back by then didn't he? Probably. Yeah, I think you're right. But that of course That whole storyline was related to the Onsaw thing in the first place, right?

Like didn't Onsla come about because Magneto took the metal out of Wolverine's bones and Professor X like said that's enough, you're gone too far, my friend and then they fought and they I'm not going to, it's a long story. But as I said, the instant you started saying that like my eyes

just kind of looked up like, is that correct? is that I don't remember. So, yes, that's exactly why. But I'm just surprised they didn't do just one or the other. Like, you know, if it's important for them to have a bone Wolverine in the game, why not just have the bone Wolverine in there and just have a Wolverine? I think you're right, Kevin. It was an opportunity for people to, like, here's the one super popular character that we still have.

Play as two of them. Although I do believe the home version just let you pick the same character over and over, can't you? Like, the arcade one says no. But you can unlock that as an option. Right. So I definitely have memories of playing three cables. I have that memory. Three Juggernauts was one of my favorite team.

All of them can do the power-up glitch. And then every assist is painful. But, yeah, as you might have guessed, with 56 characters in the roster, things change. It's no longer two-on-two. We now are going three-on-three. Not only is it three-on-three, all your characters, you could swap at any time. time, and as a sort of an allusion to the last game, you can summon your partners in to do assist maneuvers. They'll just jump in, they'll do something, and they'll jump back out.

And you have some control over this, because when you choose your characters, you choose what type they are. I believe it's, I believe in the Japanese version, it's alpha, beta, gamma, but in the English versions, they sort of give you like a keyword, like anti-air or, you know, projectile. Yeah. They give you, like, a hint. Expansion. Yeah.

So when you pick that, that determines what their assist move is. And that also determines what super move that is if you call them and do a big group super. And let's be frank, this explodes the game into territory that no one could have possibly anticipated, you know, you want infinites. It's like infinite's infinites. Like everyone can do so much. You can have, you know, potentially you can have six characters on the screen all doing different moves at each other. Like that can happen. And it does happen.

This game's bonkers. Yeah. I don't know that there was really any attempt on Capcom's part to just balance things out. It really feels like they just threw everything in there. More is more. It took like a pass on it. And they're like, good enough. We need to get this out the door.

Because some of these characters are like really awful. And some of it's my design, like the little serve bot, the Coboon. He's awful. He's a joke character. He doesn't really do much of anything. He's just very small. Role is kind of a joke. She doesn't really get to do very much.

But then you have a character like Magneto, who is super fast and could just get on top of you super easily. You have Storm who has a super where she just drops hail over the entire screen, and you can't really get away from it. You just have to, like, take the hit or take the block damage. And then on the other hand, you have, I don't know, guile throwing a little sonic boom. They just threw it all together and let people cook, really. That's what it feels like. Yeah, a lot of the classic street fighter characters really seem to get the short shrift in this game. Maybe by virtue of just how their move set was already sort of kind of set in stone before something like something like this was ever dreamed up.

But, you know, Kevin basically just mentioned two of the three most used characters in the game, Storm and Magneto. and the other one is Sentinel because he could fly around the stage at will. So he can, I mean, in a game series that really sort of forced you to be jumping all the time, like you're constantly in the air, you're air dashing all the time, being on the ground, it's not really going to do you any good in most situations. You've got to be sipping around the stage. There were characters that could literally just fly around the stage. And because those things were there, one of the best parts of this game and one of the more interesting aspects of it,

is that you really have to start thinking in terms of team composition. And those are not my words. Seth Kalyan would a really, really great fighting game primer for what was Gama Sutra like 15 years ago. And, you know, he mentions that like, okay, if you're going to be picking a character like Sentinel, then you should have an assist character that can do an anti-air that goes the full height of the screen, not just like Ryu doing an uppercut. You need like a laser beam that goes from the ground, all the way through the top of the screen

because Sentinel is going to be at the top of the screen at some point, right? So people pick Sentinel Cable and Captain Commando, who is a lesser character in this game, but his anti-air is awesome because it does do that. So you really have to start thinking in terms of, like when you want to play this at high level, who is going to be in my point character, who's the character that I can get in with,

and basically generate a lot of meter, harass the opponent enough that maybe I can take down, on one of their characters, but if not, it's okay. Who's the second character who's basically just going to be my, my assist? Who's the person that's just going to help my other characters either launch other people in the air or keep them locked into place? And then you've got an anchor character that's supposed to be like the big damage dealer. That's where like storm comes in and stuff like that.

So people have over the years really devised really interesting teams that think in those terms. Like, this is basically a card game and you're building a deck. Other really great players. I mean, it's, and for decades, this was thought to be a set in stone thing, right? Like, these five or six characters are really just the game and everybody else is just window dressing. But guys like Justin Wong has made his bones the last five or six years or so by going deep into this game and saying pretty much everybody is viable, we can do 100. percent combos with pretty much any team. It's doable.

There's just so much weird stuff happening in this game. And by virtue of how the game engine works, not everybody is going to be good as everybody else, but at least almost the entire cast can do some wild stuff. And that's why it's sort of endured as long as it has. Oh, yeah. They also added anacharis to this game from Darkstock. He's another newcomer to the series. And, like, he can do wacky stuff.

like even in terms of a Darkstalker's character, like summoning the sarcophagy to just drop on people from like the very top of the screen, like if he did not have to deal with Magneto, he would be wild and like super strong. So like if you're playing him and you need to put him with someone who can take out the problem characters for him and hope like heck that you don't get him snapped in.

Like that's one of the new functions in the game is you can snap in one of your, one of your opponent's other characters. So you can wail on them if they have like a bad matchup or if they're weak and they're trying to heal them up. So, you know, there's a lot of strategy in this game. This is actually the game that got me interested in fighting games competitively. I was never any good at it, mind you.

But it was this one when it came out at that point. I had a job so I could go to the arcade. So I started going to the arcade to play Marvel 2. I got a fight stick. I got a green goblin to play the dribble. to play the Dreamcast port because, you know, trying to play this game on a Dreamcast pad is awful, awful. Cannot recommend it.

It hurts your thumb. But, yeah, this was such like, this game was a huge thing for around the crowds that I hung out in. And it remained a huge thing forever. And maybe getting ahead of ourselves. But back to something that you said a second ago, this was actually, like, the control scheme for this game was built a round the Dreamcast pad in mind.

It's, instead of six buttons across three punches, three kicks, it's two punches, two kicks, and you're supposed to chain the two light ones together. The second hit of the chain is the medium attack. Come on, John. Say the line. Say the line. Medium punch, which is light punch twice. Light punch, medium punch, which is light punch twice.

Excuse me. Medium punch. which is light punch twice. And so the other two buttons from the six are your assist buttons. Like, one character is assigned it to each of them. And in that Arcadia interview that we mentioned earlier, they come right out and say that, like, we built this for, like, people to take their Dreamcast controllers to an arcade

and hook it up to an arcade cabin and in Japan and play this game. And what the hell? I would never do that. Yeah. And having that, like, button change to make Medium Punch, basically unacceptable or inaccessible that hurt a number of characters like Hulk's medium buttons are great but you can't really use them and Hulk outside of those has really awful normal buttons so he's not particularly useful in this game or very good and I know this was sort of a point of contention very early on when this game came out because a lot of people that got big into the earlier games particularly Marvel Cat Bomb 1 because that was pretty good hit, they were really upset that you no longer had accessed all your buttons. And I remember a lot of them jumped, like, dropped Marvel for Marvel 2 or dropped Marvel 2 when it came out

because of that. And then, but it didn't matter because a bunch of other people came in and were like, hey, this game is sick. I'm in. Yeah, the control scheme, absolutely, you can see the head consoles in mind, and we should also add the fact that this game arrived on Japanese Dreamcasts barely a month after the arcade release. So they definitely knew at this point that the home version was going to have to, like, move a lot of units. Like the arcade unit, the arcade was the arcades. And at least in Japan, this is very interesting.

I didn't know this because I didn't live in Japan. In Japan, they had a whole thing going on where you could bring, you know, like John's again, you bring your controller. And more importantly, you bring your VMU to the arcades. And by connecting your VMU to the arcade cabinet, that's how you were able to unlock more characters for your home version. version. Yep. Whereas the home version's released overseas didn't really do that. It was just a simple point shop.

So the more you played the game, the more points you got, the more things you could unlock. And that's how that worked. I think the arcades also in a, like the American version that I saw, I think they were all time released. Like the longer the game was running, the more characters would unlock. Yes. But this, in Japan, they had a whole like integral thing, which was, you know, very Neo-Gio of them, which I appreciate.

But, yeah, I can't imagine bringing a controller to the arcade when I have a stick right there, you know, unless, am I supposed to bring my, my Dreamcast stick to the arcade? Because that's heavy. That's a beast. Yeah, I remember, I remember the Unlocks being a real point to contention, because I knew some friends who had imported the game. And they're like, okay, well, I can only unlock some of the characters without, you know, access to Japanese internet, because some of them you had to unlock by playing online matches using the Dreamcast modem.

Right. Dreamcast again. Head of its time. Obviously, that was not a functionality that they included in the U.S. release, so they just changed that. But in Japan, you need to be able to hook it into the arcade machines. And I remember there was an import store that actually sold Save Files that had everything unlocked for the Japanese version for like, I forget five bucks or something. They would just pop in your VMU and put it out, copy it over to you and give it back. I don't know how much business they did with that, but I would like. like to think that it was pretty brisk. I downloaded one from

Game Facts. I remember, I looked it up. They had custom save files. I'm like, here, here's all this stuff for you. And I remember downloading that. I was like, yeah, I don't want to do all this. Just give it to me. Which may have been a mistake. It may have been like going to the buffet and just like bringing a shovel. Like, okay, I want all my food at once. So, you know, I don't know if 23-year-old

me was correct in that assumption. But that's what I did. And I can't, I guess that's a way to make money. Oh, sure. I found this internet. I'll, I'll give for five bucks, kid, but sure. The funniest thing for the time release on the arcade cabs is

I had a friend in high school. He was the guy who got me into competitive fighting games in the first place. And I remember him getting super stoked when Thanos got unlocked at the local arcade. And, you know, Thanos, he was the boss of Marvel superheroes. He was super busted

in that game. So he was really excited. He's like, all right, Thanos is going to be so cool. I'm going to mess up everybody. He got there, rushed in after school. Thanos sucks so bad in this game. He's so awful. He's slow. His buttons are awful.

His super's are okay, but like, why would you waste all your super meter on Thanos when you could, I don't know, pick cable? So he was very disappointed. And I feel like in our modern, you know, Thanos-brained world, we could all relate to being disappointed. Yes, Marvel would never let that happen now. They would insist that Thanos be top tier. Yes, that Thanos would be cable in this game. I can't emphasize enough how good cable is in this game. He's got a super that basically like strings into itself if you're good at the inputs.

So one touch from cable will basically annihilate a whole character. And since assist characters still take damage, too, if they're out on the screen at the time, you know, there's plenty of video out there of in high-level competition and even, frankly, any kind of competition, we're like accidentally all three characters from one side around the screen, and then a cable comes out and just levels them all with a hyper-viper beam. And it's just, you know, the whole match done in 10 seconds. And it's sad but funny. But please look those up.

They're really satisfying. Yeah, like, I'm not even good at that. this game and I can pull off an air hyper viper beam. I can't necessarily chain it into itself very consistently, but I can do one. And that's usually enough to wipe out an assist because they take extra damage.

So if it's a character that's already pretty squishy like Strider or Siloak, they are done. They're gone. I've always filed that this game, I'm going to also preface this by saying that I'm also not really a huge fan of this game. I really appreciate it from a distance

and for what it did for the American fighting game scene for as long as it did and we'll get to that. But like, I've tried to learn this a couple of times and I've had a lot of people try to sit down with me like,

this is what this does and this is how you should think and blah, blah, blah, blah. But I really think that this is definitely the most Capcomi of Capcom fighting games where someone needs to teach you how to do these things. Like someone needs,

if you want to learn how to play fighting games competitively, largely, especially now with the internet, with YouTube, you can probably figure out most stuff on your own, even the more obscure things and even, you know, regular old World Warrior Street Fighter 2 you can figure out. But like, there was a lot of weird things happening under the hood in this game. Some of them can't possibly be there by design, like all the on-the-ground combos and relaunches and things like that, that couldn't have been there by design. But people have figured that out and relatively quickly in this game's lifespan that like you need somebody to be like, all right, when you're cable or when you're this character, when you're this character, you do a super, you match all the buttons on the stick because you're going to get more hits. The game doesn't tell you that, but it's there.

You're going to get 25, 35% more damage if you just start matching buttons because there's just so much happening in this game all at once. It's super, it moves so quickly, and it's really, really easy to lose track of where you are and where the opponent is that, like, unless you're really keyed in, it's a difficult game to sort of parse, even if you're just a casual observer, especially if you're a casual observer. So it's, it's a fun party game, really, in that, like, if no one knows what they're doing, it is like just mashing all of your, your G.I. Joe guys together and seeing who win. But, like, when really good fighting game players come out, it's just, it's psychotic. It's impossible to really see what's going on unless you really know what to look for. It's a zany game. It's fun to watch. Yes.

All of these games that we're talking about are pretty fun to watch, like, people who know what they're doing, play the game. And, yeah, I also kind of bounced off it. As soon as Capcom versus S&K1 came out, I just started playing that instead. But this was a really, like, formative game, I'd say, for the U.S. fighting game scene. Because, you know, they were big in Street Fighter 2, and it was pretty big for Mortal Kombat 2 and 3 in Samurai Showdown. But the late 90s were not kind to it because that's when fighting games stopped being as popular. And I feel like this game sort of sustained a scene for quite a while, right all the way through the doldrums of the 2000. I remember this was like the this was like the keynote game for the Evo series even before it was

Evo like they would end their sessions with Marvel 2 and after Marvel 2 like the last time they ran it because Marvel 3 was coming out I remember there's a video going around of just the organizers of the event just like smashing all of the broken dream cast that had failed like over the course of the weekend. And they're like, I'm so glad we don't have to deal with like this old hardware anymore that was not meant to be running for like three days straight, 10 years after it was made. But yeah, it's a really fascinating game. And there's still glitches that have being turned up, like I think a couple years ago, someone found a bug that when you, that lets you

attack on like the very first frame of a, of the fight, which is really big for a character like Magneto, who has very fast moves. So like, the, that, the natural response to that becomes, like, okay, if there you got Magneto on their team, you should probably start with someone like Sentinel who has a hit of Super Armor, and therefore you can negate that. And like it just layers upon itself. And that's just sort of the beauty of this game that I also don't enjoy playing very much, but it's so fun to watch.

I do think one of the, one of the great strengths of having it being re-released this year is you've seen, you know, with our current YouTube and streaming culture, you've seen an, I've seen an abundance of people coming out of people coming up. that would work with tutorials and explainers. And, you know, we mentioned Justin Wong before. Justin Wong was playing this game so much that Steam reviews mention him by name. You know, there are people who bought this game on Steam discovered that he was in there. It was Wazler, right? The Wazler. Yeah.

And, like, they got their ass beat. They're like, I'm in front of this game. This game is too hard. But, like, obviously that stings if you're the player. But if you go online, I'd like just watch him on Twitter or YouTube, whatever. He is constantly showing up all kinds of. stuff. He's trying new, as John mentioned, he tries new teams all the time. You know, because he's so good at the game in general, he can try, like, you know, two characters he knows well, and one

character he doesn't even know at all. And he'll just, he'll figure it out live on camera. It's like, okay, what works? What doesn't work? You know, he'll let the crowd give him a team. Like, uh, what, Iceman, Sentinel and like Omega Red? Fuck it. Let's go. And then he'll just, yeah, you're right. He'll figure it out on the fly. It's great. And he's been doing that since before this re-release. He was trying to, like, this was sort of up and running fairly well on FightCade within the last couple of years, maybe year or two, but still not Arcade Perfect. And, you know, he'd get on there and he wouldn't really roll people in FightCade, but he'd get in there and just muck with the game. And it's awesome to see people that have been playing this for that long still do that kind of stuff. Yeah, this was the game that made him like a name in the fighting game scene. I remember. I remember after it came out, and I was reading about Shore You Can Forums, and they just kept talking about, like, there's this kid in New York at Chinatown Fair.

There's only, like, two people who can beat him. He whips everybody else. Oh, he's traveled out to some event in California or Chicago or whatever. He whipped everyone there. Didn't lose anyone. And that was Justin Wong, and that was sort of like, this is his game. I'm sure he would agree. Like, this is his jam, like, is his go-to.

yeah and he was a literal kid at the time too like everybody else was in like teenager their 20s and he was like 15 or whatever but um yeah everybody knows the lay fighting game person or video game observer knows justin Wong from evil moment 37 but that that is not how justin is known in the old timey fighting game community um another really cool thing about this game especially for observers and not players is that because it's a three on three game, there's a handful of really good all-rounder characters on the roster. There are some real incredible comebacks that happened in this game. So, like, there's a real, I can't remember which Evo it was, but, like, there's some really bad, like, shaky handheld camera video of this of, like, Justin getting just his face kicked in, and he was down to his Cyclops, who only had, like, maybe two-thirds or half of his life left, and his Cyclops took out all three of the other. other person's team. And that is basically his legend right there. Like, the guy just comes

back and this game allows for some really great viewing if that's the kind of stuff that you're into. It's not necessarily, I was going to say, you know, the actual action is great. I would not say the stages or the music are particularly befitting a game this fast-paced in like high intensity. Let's let's talk about that. Yeah, it's time to talk about that stuff. Because this game as was the time, as a very popper of the time, you know, this is 2000, a lot of 2D fighting games we're trying to figure out

how can we incorporate 3D graphics because so many people think 2D art is bad and 3D is like, not just a future, but like the 3D is now and 2D is like the past and we don't want the past. And so Marvel Capcom too, obviously,

you know, which is built on like a solid decade now of, you know, 2D art, you know, some of the fantastic 2D art, what they do is They have all these 2D characters fighting their 2D war, but all the backgrounds are entirely 3D. And I'm not sure I've ever heard explanation as to why, but like the backgrounds don't seem to mean anything, or at least they, they're from somewhere else. Like, Marvel Capcom 1, every stage is like a delight of sort of like details you can pick up on. What's that over there?

Who's that over there? Is that Dr. Wiley? you know Marvel Capcom 2 it's like I'm looking at a clown it's a very large clown the clown moves his hands and opens his eyes now we're in a we're in a we're in a frozen wasteland and it's very cold here there's a big clock oh look it's based on the system clock of the dream cast that's neat yeah so you get these graphics which are like they're good graphics for the time I mean I'm not gonna I'm not gonna lie I didn't say I looked at it's like oh wow look at these graphics but it's like eventually you're sort of like well what am I looking at at here. Where are we? Like, what, you know, what universe is this? Because it's not Capcom

universe and it's not Marvel universe. It doesn't feel like nothing, none of these stages look to me like anything. The best I can give them is that there's a ship stage that I assume is Ruby Hearts pirate ship. And there's like a desert that I assume is a mingo's. And beyond that, it's just have fun. Figure it out. And in line with that, you have the music, which is from, What's the name? Sorry, John found the name. Tetsia Shibata, who worked on Power Stone. And the music for Marvel Capcom 2 is not like any other music in any other video game at that point.

And mostly since, like, it is a hard swerve. And that doesn't mean bad, but at the time, and, you know, people talk to this, they're surprised. But no, at the time, when you make something that is so different than everything else, yeah, a lot of people are just going to say, what the hell is this? I didn't ask for this. I don't want this. Therefore, it is bad. And that was a very real reaction from a lot of people. I've said this before in the podcast. Say it again. Game fan magazine. Game fan magazine reviewed, you know, all these games all the time. They would break down each game. You know, they do like EGM style, but their breakdowns would include like graphics and sound, whatever. I don't know who the character was, but one of their characters, when they reviewed Marvel Capcom 2, when they talked about music, they didn't put a number.

they just put an emoji angry face. That was their review of the music from World Capital Home 2. And like, you know, today it sounds good and people like people do covers. It's really nice. But wow, it really doesn't fit the vibe of we've got six superhumans throwing themselves at each other. They're exploding. Everything's on fire. But let's, you know, who, yeah.

Yeah. Woo-hoo. Like, it's just, it's in Congress. It is. It was incongruous. Yeah. And the announcer was just as wacky. He just said, like, and the tone in his voice, oh, my God, I just had a heart attack there.

It's like quiet storm DJing. It's very weird. But fun. It's like, you're right. We love it now. And it's been memed to death. Even, like, in that proto-in-examined. internet age of 2000, ooh, so long ago.

Like, people were kind of clowning on this game and for its music and it's sound. But, like, I think because of that, because of the internet, even back then, it just became something that we all sort of slowly fell in love with over time. It also resulted in a huge, in a huge mod scene, we should say, because people so didn't like the music. They actually went out of their way to take the music out and play their own music, which also went hand in hand with custom colors which is also a big thing that people

don't really talk about as much today because obviously consoles and always online internet like you know a Steam game of course Steam games have all have mods on them but you know if you buy a PlayStation 5 game instead of reverse compared to a PlayStation 1 game like PlayStation 1 games you could literally mod your console and mess with them I don't know if you can do

that with PlayStation 5 without violating some kind of warranty that's you know and for an always online console that's a problem you know that is problem. Yeah, I remember, like, back in the day, there was, like, whole threads about how do you mod this game and, like, people digging into the code of Marvel 2 and figuring out how is the music stored? What's the file type? How do you convert things to that file type? How do you make it loop properly? You know, where do they store the colors? So there's all sorts of, like, really

fascinating mods out there, like the, there's sort of a famous video on YouTube of, you know, yipes back in his Marvel 2 days, talking about, like, the, the Knicks version of Sentinel or the Mango Sentinel. And that's a, that is a color mob. That is not in the game. They added it to, I think, Marvel 3. Yeah. It's like a little Easter egg, but, and then there's still, like, a group on Facebook of

people who are still modding this game and, like, coming up with their own colors and everything. It's really fascinating. There was a Rolling Stones article, a Rolling Stone article from a few years ago that talked a lot about this and like talk to some of the big fighting game people from then and like Living Lovita Loka was a big song in one of the mixes. I have like a Wu-Tang clan mix. That's pretty, pretty sweet.

God, what was something like? Sandstorm from Derrude. That was a huge one. All sorts of like really funky soundtracks that people were putting together. And I think that's like an easily overlooked part of this. game's legacy because you can't really stream with any of these, right? Because you'll just get a DMCA or they'll mute your stream and all that

fun stuff. But like that offline scene back before streaming was a thing, they were all using these. They weren't using the default soundtrack. And I think it was like a bone they threw to them when this got a port in

2009 to Xbox Live and PSN that they had an option for you to just like, okay, well, we'll like mute the game and let you just play whatever music you want. That was a neat little touch. Yeah, the guy that tried to teach me this game for the first time, he had his modded to play the Transformers, the movie soundtrack.

I think I've heard that one before. It fit. Oh, yeah. Everything fit really well. That soundtrack kicks ass is what it does. That's the problem. That kicks ass. So you have a game, with kick-ass soundtrack, it's going to work.

Yeah. Yeah, the, like, that synth overture, do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-that kind of thing was playing over the characters. select screen and I'm like, is this really is this really in the game? Like, did they license this? And I didn't find out until a little later, but all the same. It fit pretty well.

Get there to be stupid for the clown stage. Happy birthday, Weird Al. You can be a coffee achiever. You can sit around the house and watch to leave it the fever. A future's up to you. So what you're going to do? Gotta be stupid. What did I say?

Dare to be stupid. Tell me what I say. It's all right? We can be stupid all right. Come on, join the crowd. Let me shout it out loud. All right, let's advance because we are, we want to get to really two more games on this list. So let's advance to the far off year of 2011.

So a full 11 years later, we get Marvel Capcom 3. And obviously in that time, you know, some business comes and goes, we have some ports. You know, we talked about the, it was kind of a surprise at the time, the 2009 online port of Marvel Capcom 2, which led to other ports. And I guess because they got the band back together, Marvel Capcom came together and said, all right, 2011, here we go. Marvel Capcom 3, Fate of Two Worlds, FTW, it's a big joke, you get it. Now, at this point, the arcades are a long memory. So this is designed and released for home systems, your PlayStation 3s, and your Xbox 3, and your Xbox 3, And again, this is post-Street Fighter 4.

So what kind of game is this? It's a 2D fighter, but now all the assets are in 3D. So all your fighters are basically 3D models, but, you know, fighting on a 2D plane. You know, they've got some outlines to them that are, you know, artistic, but basically it's, you know, it's very much like the Street Fighter 4, the Street Fighter 4 ethos, if you will. And we should also point out by now 2011, at this point, the MCU has started. And the MCU is, you know, it's doing okay.

It's not quite the juggernaut, if you will, that it will be, because this is 2011, and Avengers arrives the following year, 2012, but by this point, you've already had Iron Man as a big hit. Iron Man 2 made a lot of money. Thor, I think 2011 is the year Captain America comes out. So the signs are there, that something is brewing in cinemas and something's going to happen. So Marvel is looking, you know, Marvel's popular. Capcom is, you know, selling what it's selling. You know, obviously this comes on the heel of Street Fighter 4.

And Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil 5 sold many copies. Do not forget that Resident Evil 5 sold many copies and for a long time was Capcom's number one game, like, of all games. So, yeah, here they go. We got Marvel Capcom 3. And who's in Marvel Capcom 3?

Well, surprise, surprise, three characters from Resident Evil 5. I'll do a line up real quick because it's so much. It's actually, it's a pretty big roster for a brand new game that is not working on any real, like pre-existing assets. I guess some of these 3D models may have been Street Fighter 4, but like most of these

characters are new, and certainly all the backgrounds are new. I think some of them came from Tatsunoko versus Capcom as well. Well, that's also in development around the same time, right? 2011, so... Yeah, fairabouts. It came out in like 2008. Is that right? Yeah, this was

on the resin needle engine, I think. Oh, was it? I think that's what it was built on. Was the R.E.5 engine? I could be wrong about that, but it wasn't built on this three-fighter four engine. Okay, I apologize for my error. Let me do the run down real quick here. So we got Jill Valentine, Albert Wesker, Chris Redfield, Akima, Tronbon, Zero.

Crimson Viper, Chunli, Liu, Trish, and Dante, Amitarrasu, Nathan Spencer, aka Bonac Commando, Beautiful Joe, Sienko, Morgan, Felicia, Arthur, Mike Hagar, yes, Mike Hagar, yes, Mike Hagar from Final Fight. On the marble side, Dr. Doom, Dormammu, Schumagorath, Super Scroll, Super Scroll, Modoc, Taskmaster, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Storm, Wolverine, Deadpool, Magneto, X-23, this is definitely the first time I've ever heard, X-23, Phoenix, Sentinel, Hulk, and She-Hulk. Super Scrolls fun. Yes.

But one thing I think that I really enjoyed, that even for, me as someone who at this point was very much a lapsed Marvel reader, I really enjoyed just sort of this overview of comic books, like, oh, I've heard of them, I've never heard of them, but they look cool. And likewise, Capcom with his own history, it's like, some of these characters are really big, but other characters, like, Amaterasu and Beautiful Joe, like, those games did not sell very well, and certainly at that point were, you know, almost a decade old, or at least not a decade, but, like, not really talked about much. There were a few years, old. Yeah. They were not on the cusp of things like, say, Devil May Cry or Resident Evil were.

So it's like, they, it's like, okay, here's the characters that people might not recognize it first, but we love them, you know? Certainly Arthur, I mean, how long have been since Arthur had been in the game? It's been quite a while, you know, unless you count the PSP version, you know, of Ultimate Ghouls and Ghosts. You know, Mike Hagar, final fight, that was definitely a poll and led to so many wonderful fan arts of him delivering a suplex to the final boss, who we get to, you know, just. wonderful artwork out there. But I think, like, as a general, like, roster,

I think a lot of people were kind of impressed. That's how I felt. Like, cool. And certainly it came out in an era, you know, at this point in, you know, social media was a huge thing. So if you launched a fighting game, you didn't just launch a fighting game. What happened was you introduced a fighting game and you reveal, like, I don't know, four characters.

And then over the next year, you slowly tease out two more, two or three characters at a time so that you're always dominated the new cycle of here's a new character, here's a new character, here's a new character. And I feel like today we've kind of, we've kind of exhausted this. Like people are like, no, really, just tell us who's in the game. But it was

a thing. It was definitely a thing. So around this time, you know, I was going to TGS a lot. I was already writing about video games. You know, whenever I went to TGS, I could expect a new character trailer. You know, knew something. Maybe a new playable character. And it's just, that's how it went.

Yeah, some of these were really interesting, like, how they adapted them. I know, like, C. Viper, they actually, did they do this for Ultimate? Or was it in this one where they gave her the optic blast from Cyclops as like a move? Oh, I don't know. I think that's an Ultimate. I don't remember. I'm sorry, I don't remember. That was like a really cool, like, idea.

They're like, oh, she has red glasses. Cyclops is red glasses. Keep not in the game. Let's give it to her. Or their Super Scroll. If I remember reading when this game came out. out. Marvel wanted all the fantastic four in this, and Capcom's like, well, that's four characters.

What if we just combine all their powers and just run Super Scroll? And Capcom was like, oh, that's, or Marvel was like, oh, that's fine. So we got Super Scroll, who was super cool and also a very weird, like, pick in, uh, in isolation. Yeah, Phoenix was a really interesting adaptation, how they brought in that character and, uh, voiced by Jennifer Hale, who now voices the character on X-Men 97, which is a very weird reversal of how things went in the last episode of Marvel Games. Well, she is Canadian, so it was bound to happen. Yeah.

So it's a really cool lineup. I really had no complaints about it. Yeah. Like, I really like some of the choices that they made on the Marvel side specifically. Like, I think Deadpool was such a big hit from the comics reading community that he was sort of a shoe in and Thor was really in the middle of a really good reboot at that point

that they used his redesign outfit and I think he played really interestingly big slow sort of project still shooting projectiles and stuff but yeah really good cast really beginner friendly game it didn't move

really as fast I think as Marvel 2 at least not yet not yet right right and It also sort of restructured the button layout of the game, too, so you're not really dealing with, you know, you're still sort of messing with six buttons, but not quite to the degree that Marble 2 was. So it was just like a low, medium, high punch assists and a launcher button or a special button. That was largely a launcher for most people.

And that was pretty, I think, easy for people to really wrap their head around. But yeah, really great cast. Still three on three. saddled with some weirdness because, like, we're going to get to this in a second, too, but, like, its own sequel came out so quickly afterward, but, like, the competitive scene to this really latched onto it pretty quickly from what I remember. Like, they were, you know, we're two years removed from the home console version of Street Fighter 4, so people were really ready, sort of, for that next big thing, and this was kind of it.

But it had a lot of, like, single-player content, too, which I think people really appreciated, and the sequel really didn't favor as heavily as the original. release did. Do you want to talk about that real quick? Well, I wanted to mention just quickly, another thing, because this is a console game, and certainly given the error it came out in, DLC is a big part of this game. Right at the top, I mentioned Jill Valentine and Schumagorath. Those characters are not in the base game. Those cost extra.

Even in the sequel, if you want those two characters, you have to pay for them. The modern ports unlocked this by default. But at the time, if you saw the roster and you saw those two characters, you're like, oh, I want those characters. Well, you've got to pay extra for those. Also, because every character is a 3D model, this opens up a lot more options as far as costume choices. Like, you know, in the 2D era, it's like, okay, you want to change the costume? Well, we can change the colors. That's what we can give you.

You know, best I can do. But now it's all 3D models. So some characters have entirely alternate costumes, not just alternate colors, which means you get stuff like Spider-Man has like the Scarlet Spider vest on him, you know? or what's a good example They were usually based on what had been going on in the comics Like I know Hulk had a Red Hulk Sure God, I'm blanking, it's been so long

Since I really messed with them I know Spider-Man had the Iron Spider from Civil War The different Wolverine outfits of over the years That's kind of a lay-up Yeah, that's right Yeah, some of them were just like alternate outfits that they used to have I remember Spencer has the NES Bionic Commando look

because Bionic Commando rearmed had come out around this time and his default was based on the 3D game that has been fairly maligned since then but he's a much cooler character when he looks like a nerd from the 80s I think we can all agree but some of these characters some of these skins unfortunately were

purchasable you had to buy them like the game came with, you know, the game, obviously you can't all play the same character, so the game has some alternate skins in it. But a lot of them, such as the Bionic Commando one, you had to pay for them. Yeah. Which, uh, I know for me was definitely a sort of point, like, oh, man, I don't, I don't want to pay for a cosmetic. Like, that to me was like, I can, like, a new, a new character, I'll consider it. But you want me to buy a new costume? I do not want to buy a costume. I'm sorry. And remember they had to cut out Magneto's alternate costume because, uh, it's on the disc, because all this DLC is on the disc. Uh, but he had, uh, but he had,

his House of M outfit, which caused a bit of a issue because it's literally just the clothes that the King of Spain, like, wears, like, as his official outfit. And I guess the Spanish were not thrilled about this being on Magneto, so Capcom had to just never release, like, the code to let you, like, actually use them. But the data's there? Yeah, so people found a way to unlock it. And, of course, you know, today, if you play it on Steam, you know, today, if you play it on Steam, You can just download it.

It's fine. But it is funny how they announced the costume. And the nation of Spain said, now, wait a second. Hang on. Yeah, it was announced. Like, they promoted it. Wow. It just never happened.

Well, you just brought up something that's really interesting about this game. And more so, what, Street Fighter Cross Tekken. But, like, this DLC was mostly finished on the disc if you bought the game on a disc, right? Yeah. So there is a playable but not 100% finished version of Jill Valentine, for example. So this was definitely, we're still sort of in the wild west of DLC. Like, how much are we charging for things? What are people actually going to pay for?

And so this was part of a larger discussion of like, what do you own? So if I buy this disc, I should already own Jill Valentine. I shouldn't have to pay for the DLC because the data is on the disc that I bought. And so this was a major topic of discussion all around the games industry for at least a few months. And then Street Fighter Cross Tekken really kind of did this in a much worse way because there was a ton of characters and extra stuff that was on the disc. And all you're really doing is paying to unlock them from something that if you bought it physically, you already physically own. So there was a lot of kind of like ethical navel gazing and lots of think pieces in the games press about this. but it was a really interesting time for DLC,

and Capcom learned some tough lessons out of this game, we'll say, and that maybe we shouldn't leave half-finished characters out there for people to just date a mind for themselves. But on the flip side, like years into the future, the modding scene for this game, especially on Steam, is just absolutely bonkers. And, like, people have sort of latched onto it. And if it have been adding a bunch of new characters over the years,

like Gambit, Cyclops and stuff like that. I haven't really checked in for a while, but a lot of this stuff is perfectly playable, even online, and people are running tournaments with, like, new versions of essentially this entire game, which is pretty awesome. I mean, even if you're really not into the game very much, like, you know, just do a little bit of digging, and you can see a lot of footage of very cool stuff that people have just done in their spare time.

Yeah, and I know this game is sort of a love it or hate it, and maybe both a situation because of like two of the new mechanics. So the one is like a team aerial combo where you, while you're doing an air combo, you can push a direction and I think it's the special button and you will launch your opponent in one of the directions and your next character will come in to continue the combo, which can lead to a bunch of infinites.

But they can counter that if they push like the same direction that you did when you do it. And they'll like sort of push you out. out and then they can do their thing. And that one, like, people sort of accepted the infinites coming off of it. Not great, but whatever. It's the other mechanic, the X factor, that is, I feel much more divisive. So this is, I think you push all four attack buttons at the same time, once per match,

and your characters will get a boost to, like, speed and strength. And depending on how many characters you have, Depends on how long it is and how much faster and stronger you get. And this is, this kind of, like, breaks the game. I think your point character also heals their red health, too. Yes. They all, they all heal up faster. And, yeah, your point character will heal up while fighting as well.

So, like, you suddenly have this situation where you can make a, you can not only make a comeback, but you could absolutely, like, decimate the other person if you've got, like, the advantage. because you can combo into these X-Factors. Like, you can just cancel whatever you're doing into it. So, like, if you're on offense and you're, you know, destroying your opponent's team, you can X-Factor, just completely wipe out whichever character and then, you know, start the incoming mix, like, in Marvel 2. So, yeah, this is always the thing that I hear people who play Marvel 3, like, oh, I love this game. I hate X Factor or I love X Factor because I'm the one who just won with it.

You know, that's what I think. I feel a lot of the old-timey fighting game people really, really despise this game. Like the Marvel 2 diehards that have been like basically keeping the lights on in the U.S. didn't really glom onto this. But like, you know, Justin, not to keep bringing him up, he was an early champion of this game. I mean, not just like from a competitive standpoint, but like, no, this is. good. And it's not like it's just a bunch of new Capcom staff that's making this stuff. The guy that basically built Third Strike, NeoG, he worked on this game. These guys aren't

messing around. So it's, it had a really weird early reputation in fighting game circles that has sort of gotten much brighter over time, especially after the next couple of games that came out. But it's still sort of a, it feels like it's kind of a footnote anymore, like especially with the re-release of Marvel 2 that just happened. I don't really know how big of a scene this still really has, but it wasn't Evo retro game. What, last year or two years ago? It was last year.

Yeah. 2023. No, it was a... I feel like there's still a scene for this because the net code is just like the 2011 net code and therefore not great. I think they use, like, different software, like Parcic to actually run it. But, yeah, it's got a scene. They play it pretty.

regularly. I do want to move on to the sequel, because that's a very big part of this talk of this game, but I do also want to mention the fact that after Marvel Copcom 2 had a boss so forgettable that we basically skipped him, a guy called Abyss, who does not exist. The Capcom made him up, Abyss. It's basically like onslaught, but bigger. In this game, like, no, no, no, no. We want to have something that matters to people.

So they're bringing Galactus. Galactus is the boss of Mortal Capcom 3, and Galactus, the guy, not Galactus the Cloud, 20th century fox it is Galactus as a guy wearing a big goofy helmet and he is so big he doesn't fit on the screen and I do love the whole sequence

in that you're fighting him in front of the planet on like this asteroid you're basically like bumping his chest because that's all you can really get on the screen with him like that's how giant he is

and you fight a team first you fight a team of his his heralds which is just a silver-colored team which is like that's funny they're all silver I get it and then you fight Galactus

himself and he of course is a big lumbering beast with giant moves. And, you know, if you hit him right, you can do enough damage and win the day. But if you screw up, he will just kill you and the game over. And then you get this, unfortunately, on skimble cut scene where he destroys the Earth, which to me as a player, I was like, come on, I just want to try again. Just let me try again?

No, I have to watch this again. Okay. Sorry, Earth. Yeah. And I remember this came with like a little comic book setting up like the premise of the game, which was a nice touch, like a physical comic book. Hmm. Yeah, all the dialogue.

I feel like in the game, they really went the extra mile. Like, again, after Marvel Capcom 2 basically took place nowhere and no one knew anything, and you all get like the generic endings, Marvel Capcom 3 said, okay, no, no, we've got pre-fight banter, we have characters saying things to other characters, like Tony, you know, Ironman Tony Stark will flirt with ladies. I know there's a thing where if you have him and he fights behind a commando, he's like, what, you couldn't afford the rest of the suit? Like, he's mocking him because he only got one arm.

Like, that's funny. Deadpool's got a thousand lines in this game his super involves beating his opponent with the actual Superbar, he pulls the Superbar off the screen and beats you with it like a bat like that's hilarious So it's not something you could have done with the sprites either They were taking advantage of the 3D

graphics Like to me that kind of stuff was really A good return to what made Marvel Capcom won so much fun Like here we are we're embracing all these characters And again you have 3D stages of course but now the 3D stages are actually based on Marvel ideas or Capcom ideas.

Like, I know there's a whole like ghouls and ghost stage. There's a whole like, you know, New York City stage with spiderwebs in the background. Like every, all these stages means something to somebody and it makes the game all the more endearing. Which is why it drove me crazy That nine months later, nine months later, the same calendar year, Capcom says, Here is ultimate Marr versus Capcom. Capcom 3, our brand new game, what do you mean we released this game already? No, this is a brand new game with more characters than ever before. It's the same systems plus it's a Vita launch title. And if you buy the Vita version and you own the PS3 version, they'll connect. You can connect them. You can play on your Vita like you're playing on the screen and, you know, touch screen. You know, very, very nice features. And yeah, we've talked about this before. We mentioned this in our fighting game Doldrums episode, but like, yeah.

Capcom insists. Capcom insists that the idea was they were going to have released Marvel Capcom 3 and then release DLC and add more characters to the game. Because they already had, you know, it launches with two characters, Sue McGarath and Jill Valentine. They wanted to launch more DLC characters. But somehow the horrific disaster of March 2011 reorganized their finances. I mean, I know the Japanese economy certainly went through some changes. I know this, because I lived here. I bought a house, but still, somehow this convinced Capcom to abandon the DLC plan, and I mean abandon it, not just like, oh, we'll release like, you know, a champion edition that has new stuff in it. Like, no, no, no, the only way to get the new characters is to buy the new game. There is no DLC plan for the new characters. You must buy a new game. There's no upgrade path like they did with Street Fighter 4 either.

Right. And like, you know, when Street Fighter 4 came out and they had a, you know, they released a new version a couple years later, at least at that point. they said, oh, we didn't know it would be such a big hit. No, no, no. You knew this was coming, but somehow this was the best solution. This was the best solution. Second game

in one calendar year. And it does a lot. They add a lot of characters, and they revamp, they rebalance a lot of characters. They change how the X-Faxor system works. You can do it in the air now. It's more visually distinct when you have X-Factor, when you don't have X-Factor.

I mean, just new characters real quickly. Dr. Strange, Firebrand, Frank West, Ghost Rider, Hawkeye, Iron Fist, that's a miss, Nemesis, Nova, Phoenix Wright, Phoenix Wright. Phoenix Wright was interesting. Yeah. Rocket Raccoon. Their Strider, Here You, Strait, Here, He was back. And we needed a third, Devil Mity Cryer character, here's Virgil. That's a lot of characters. Yeah, and Phoenix Wright was really interesting because, like, he was supposed, he was intended to be in Totsonoko versus Capcom. in 2008, and the dev team at that point abandoned the plan because they couldn't figure out how they would implement, like, a visual novel character into that game.

So here they finally, like, sorted that out. They're like, oh, this is what he'll do. He'll, like, look for clues, and that'll power him up once he finds them all. And you can have the judge attack, and Maya can help. And it's very cute. Like, these are all great, like, versions of these characters, except Iron Fist, because he's on your fist. Yep.

But the fact that you had to pay, like, was it 40 bucks at launch or something? Yeah. For a brand new disc for a game that came out earlier that year was just, it's a real kick of the teeth. Yeah, tournament organizing friends of mine were really upset about this, like really, really upset about this. And so I think that they bought a couple of copies. So at this point, I was going to this huge weekly that was at a chain restaurant. in the Cleveland area. And, like, we'd have huge crowds, 50, 60 guys showing up plus every week.

It was great. The staff hated us because most of those jerks didn't tip. But, like, the guys putting this on from week to week, they were so miffed by this. We're like, we're buying one copy of Ultimate Marvel. If people are into it, start bringing your own copies, and that's it. And because, you know, these guys are buying all the DLC. They're buying all the games. They're, you know, they're really putting a lot of their own money on the line.

I remember, yeah, there was a lot of rancor in at least my local community about a re-release so close after the original game, and that it added so much in that, like, if you want to play this, you have to play this new version. So you just, you spend $100 that year, not even on DLC on just two copies of basically the same game. Yeah, at least the DLC carries over. If, like, you already bought it for Marvel 3, like, it works for Ultimate Marvel. So that almost takes the sting out, but not really, because, again, it's full price for an upgrade, something that would now just be like, oh, here's season two of Marvel 3. But, of course, that concept didn't really exist yet, so. Yep. Also, this is the game that unlocks Galactus mode.

So if you beat the game, you can play basically a single-player version of Galactus fighting CPU teams, and it's just, you know, let's drive the big guy around for a while. That's just a fun little extra, which, and they said, they said in interviews that that was inspired by so many, you know, fan-made hacks of earlier games that let you play as bosses that normally you couldn't play as, you know, so why not play as Galactus? I think there's no tournament, you know, you can't, you know, main Galactus, but it's a fun mode there. It's a one, you know, it's a single player game. Why not? We've kind of danced around Tatsunoka versus Capcom a few times in this conversation, but that game did have characters like not quite to the scale of Galactus, but it had a few huge. characters on the roster. Yes. Yes.

So that sort of did, that was kind of the precedent there, too. But even those guys, I don't think, are tournament legal. I don't, from, from what I know. They are because you can counterplay them. Okay. I think some tournaments don't allow them. But I think generally, like, yeah, you can pick them. It's just characters like Tech a man completely demolish them.

Oh, okay. But yeah, it's, I mean, the precedent was there, and it's cool that they kind of threw that into this. I mean, it's just another. I don't know, you think, do we want to call this a bone to the fans for making them pay an extra $40? I don't know. It's the least they could do, I guess. It's the least they could do, yeah.

I feel like a lot of the hatred of this practice has sort of faded over the years because time heals all wounds. But some of us still remember. And I'm sure all the game stores that have to sell, like, vanilla versions of Marvel 3, you sure remember. Oh, yeah. I mean, you could probably go into a record exchange right now and buy Vanilla Marvel 3 for PS3 for like four bucks or something. Like, everybody just got rid of it so they could upgrade to this if they were going to play it. Everything's just as online as it is right now. This practice, it's never going to happen again. And that's, I'm glad that we've learned from Capcom's mistakes, I suppose.

Well, you know, it is still playable. It got re-released on the PS4 and the Xbox and the Steam platform. like back in 2016, 2017, and they're all still up. So I guess whatever new agreement Capcom came to with Marvel has let them keep this one for sale, hopefully for a very long time. Yes, because it's available a la carte, this one is not included in the recent Marvel Capcom fighting game collection, which means it's not on Switch. So if you buy the collection for Switch, you can play all these classic games up to and including two. But you can't play three. Three is only available on the home consoles and Steam.

But it regularly goes on sale. So honestly, at this point, just, you know, you've probably just stayed a little bit. Yeah. And with that note, we're getting close to two hours, so we should wrap things up. There is one more mobile Capcom game, but it's not retro. And frankly, it is a huge discussion to talk about what the hell happened. So we'll just, we'll sidestep that one for a future episode, perhaps in 2027 when it turns 10 years old. I don't know.

But wrapping things up here, I think Marvel Capcom as a series, for me, it was like, I viewed it as a celebration. You know, I really enjoyed the preceding game. When I saw Mobile Capcom 1, I was like, oh, this is really cool. Yes, great. When I saw Marvel Capcom 2, I was like, oh, my God, this is awesome. Even if a lot of my friends at the time, you know, much like you, John and Kevin, were kind of like, oh, I don't know. I don't know if I'm into this. So I kind of had to play it by myself, which was not the fun way to play it because I didn't have anyone to, like, experiment with.

But still, it was hugely appealing to me. And as we said, these games had very long tales, especially because, you know, right after Marvel, Marvel, Marvel Capcom 2 comes out, there's almost a decade of very few high-profile fighting game releases. And so people kept going back to Marvel Capcom 2 because it was still there and people still loved it. And probably it got even bigger over time because it was like a go-to staple. Like, oh, we still have this. We're still playing this. We're still going to it.

And then you have three, three arrives. And at first I think there's a very initial positive boom. Some people don't like it, but most people are into it. it. And then Capcom kind of kneecaps himself the same year, which is another version. And yeah, I don't know. Today, I feel like

the new release, the re-releases, I feel like, are real positive. Certainly, it's been a huge, a huge influx of warm reception, new fans, people making new material to say, hey, here's how you play this game, here's things you can do, go online.

Obviously, the new versions are all online. You can play them online. But Marvel and Capcom today are very different than the Marvel Capcom from even 10 years ago. So what do we think now? Is there a four? What would four look like? Well, they skipped over Infinite for this conversation, and that's probably for the best. But I feel like it would not look like that, certainly.

Because Marvel 3, like, it did get dinged with the ultimate debacle, but I think it's had a pretty good tale itself. Like, people were playing it pretty consistently and pretty, with pretty strong numbers right up until Infinite came out. And then, you know, Infinite was the new game and that kind of dinged the whole series. But I feel like since, you know, that game, you know, bombed, folks have gone back to three in smaller numbers. And, like, they've kept it alive. They kept it alive well enough to give it another slot at Evo, which that was cool to see. It's cool to see how the game has sort of developed over time. and I'm sure Marvel 2 will be coming at Evo

probably next year now if there's a new way to play it. But, yeah, I think whatever they do next, if they do another one, we'll probably look more like two and three with like the three versus three teams and all the wacky assists and the very... I think they will probably go with three's very, like, what's the word I'm looking for?

Very in keeping with like the themes of Marvel and Capcom, like the stages and the music. and the music that you'd see, you know, that call back to the characters, as opposed to 2 and Infinite, which are just sort of generic slop. But, yeah, I do think a Marvel 4 could happen. They worked well enough together to get this new collection out. And as we know, Capcom, if they make enough money off of something, they'll find some other way to make more money off it.

So if they're happy enough with how this collection's done, maybe we'll see you for. I think Marvel and Capcom had a pretty icy relationship after Marvel versus Capcom two in that like it felt like a really big deal when Marvel, Marvel 2 got re-released for the PlayStation 3 and 360. And, you know, a fair amount of people bought it. I think they were still that high from Street Fighter 4 that people were on. I bought it so I could sort of vote for my wallet to get a third, a re-release a third strike. But then again, after that, it was kind of nothing until Marvel versus Capcom 3. And then, you know, what we were talking about earlier, there was a real power dynamic shift when especially Marvel Infinite came out. And that Marvel was definitely calling the shots with how that game went down.

And I think that everyone is sort of in a better place now. And, you know, we're certainly seeing or we're sitting in the middle of yet another Capcom test, as we keep saying. is this re-release just came out. It seems to have sold pretty well. There's a whole lot of goodwill online for this thing. A lot of content creators, like old and new, are making a lot of content for Marvel 2 and Marvel 1, which is kind of great. So I think it's really just a matter of time before we see a Marvel 4.

I really think it's going to happen. And I really think they will call it Marvel versus Capcom 4. I don't think. I think they're just going to keep sweeping infinite under the rug. I'm loath to speculate what it's really going to look like because all I keep going back to in my head is it's just going to be an extension of how Marvel versus Capcom 3 had played with just a different art style.

Maybe back to two on two, I doubt it. But I think that they're going to go back to three on three. And I think, you know, they struck gold really with how Marvel 2 was built and how people were so into just not only playing it at super high level, but playing it at low level, just getting together with their friends and smashing buttons, and then just, you know, digging into the game, figuring out that everyone's cool to play. It's just, you know, even super competitively. You can play with almost anybody.

So I think that they're going to want to do something like that. But everyone wants to know what a cast is going to be, right? So, like, you know, that's another reason I don't want to speculate about this because, like, in what kind of good state is everybody in? Now they own 20th Century Fox. So yes, they can put X-Men characters back in those games. But what kind of more or Capcom characters are we're going to see? Like, what kind of deep cuts are going to be there?

That's the stuff that everybody wants to know. So, yeah, I think it's going to play like Marvel 2 or Marvel 3, but I think it's just going to have sort of a blander cast. But I think it's going to happen. It's only a matter of time. Who knows? Even Infinite had Jedduff. Right.

Right. That was a deep cut. At that point, definitely. Just for reference, I looked it up on SteamDB right now. So at this point, as we speak, Ultimate Roman Capcom 3 has a 24-hour peak of 171 players. Compare that to the new hotness, of course, the fighting game collection, double that, 342. Yeah. So there's still an audience out there.

There's people are still, you know, 171 active players at any given time is pretty good. I think, certainly how big people have Steam. But obviously, the collection's got a lot more attention on it right now. It's newer. It's hyper, it's an all-time peak of 6,000, which is way higher than anything ultimate World Capcom 3 ever got. And that's way higher than the other Capcom re-release stuff. So like the first fighting game collection with all those Dark Sockers games, I don't think

that they had that many concurrent players. People jump ship from the Street Fighter anniversary collection to play on. to fight cave for games like Third Strike and the old, like, Super Turbo and stuff like that. So to have that many concurrent players for Ultimate Marvel 3 is, that's saying something. That's pretty good. Yeah. Obviously, they're all here for the Punisher. Why wouldn't they be?

You said it, John. The all-time peak for Capcom fighting collection on Steam, 828. So that's peanuts compared to the numbers we just shared. So, yeah. I guess Dark Sixers are still dead, but Marvel Capcom. for it could happen, and they'll put dark searches in there. Morgan will show up. Maybe he had a car, so come back. I've got fingers crossed. Anyway, two hours. That's been Retronauts. Thank you so much for joining us. If you're listening to this episode for free,

guess what? Today's my birthday. Thank you very much. That's when this is a happy birthday. Thank you very much. And thank you for listening. However, however, if you go to patreon.com slash retronauts, you could have heard this episode a week early when I was a week younger. You would have heard a fresher version of me. $3 a month gets you episodes one week early, higher bit rate and quality audio quality, that is. The episodes are still the same quality because we make

great episodes. But for $5 a month, just $2 more than the numbers I said, guess what? Five dollars a month gets you exclusive episodes every month, two episodes, three if we have more Fridays. You get Discord access where we're talking about all sorts of games all the time including fighting games. You get

weekly columns from me and I read them to you. And I've absolutely talked about Marvel Capcom 2 and Marvel Capcom 3, and lots of other fighting games in there. If you like fighting games, go ahead. I like fighting games, too. Let me tell you how much I love the fighting games. $5 a month.

It's great. So please join us at patreon.com, so stretch or not. Otherwise, even if you listen for free, we really appreciate it because we have so much fun talking about old games. And thank you, Capcom. If you're listening, thank you for bringing back the old games. We're really excited about the S&K Capcom fighting games, which will come out sometime in 2025, question mark.

You know, going to be awesome. I'm sure we'll have another episode about that because Hey, Capcoms and Kay is a whole other series. That's a brand new conversation. The best series. Anyway, Kevin. Shots fired. Kevin, please tell us, tell the people where they can find you on the internet if you want that.

You can find me on Blue Sky at Uversaurus, and I also run Atari Archive, the YouTube video series and associated Patreon under the name Atari Archive. That's sort of discussing the history of early video games through the lens of the Atari. 2,600 library in chronological order of release. So I'm up to 82. Good times right there. Let me tell you. And beyond that, I have a book, Atari Archive Volume 1. You can buy it through Limited Run and Amazon.

Please check it out. That's you, John. Hi, I'm John. Again, you can find me at Blue Sky at John Lernid. Not a lot of writing, really, anymore, but I'm still making video series on YouTube. I've, by the time this episode goes live, the final episode of the annotated Ninja Guiden, NES, the Ninja Guidance should be complete. And for your viewing pleasure, you can find that just by doing a search for me on YouTube

or just annotated games. You'll find all the other fun stuff. Go look at it. It's the best. It's the greatest. Anitated Marvel? Well, Desk, YouTuber Desk, we've mentioned him before. He did, basically.

annotated game, what I do for Marvel Super Heroes versus Street Fighter and, like, succinctly into two videos, and it's phenomenal to watch. So go check those out, too. All right. As for me, your host, Diamond Fight, you can find me on the internet by looking for my website, which is fightclub.me. F-E-I-T, that's my last name.

C-L-U-B, that's a organization where people might play fighting games with each other. Dot M-E. Fight Club is me. You get it? And as we go out, I will just say, in the late great Stanley's words, Excelsior! Good night. Thank you.