After defining/redefining the fighting game genre with Street Fighter II and its many iterations and sequels, Capcom also spent much of the 1990s creating beloved fighters based on Marvel properties. This fisticuff-laden Marvel series started with X-Men: Children of the Atom in 1994 and reached a pinnacle with Marvel vs. Capcom 2 in 2000. Following the success of the Capcom Fighting Collection and Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle, Capcom has finally bundled all of their Marvel fighters onto modern platforms as Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics. And what’s more, the 1994 co-op beat ‘em up The Punisher is included as well. It’s a collection that every Marvel fighting game fan will want to take for a ride.
The interface is identical to that of Capcom Fighting Collection, which means it’s functional but unintuitive in places. The main menu options include Offline Play, Online Play, Museum, Fighter Awards, and Options. The Museum offers both an art gallery and a music player with content from all seven games, plus the collection’s handful of newly created pieces of art and music. These games all feature fantastic artwork, and some of them have great music, so the museum is a terrific feature. You can even browse the museum while waiting for online matches. As for the Fighter Awards, it’s an in-game Achievement browser. Each game has some Achievements/Trophies of its own, and the Fighter Awards offers convenient hints about how to unlock some of them.
Options are where things get a little convoluted. Some of the collection’s options are found in the Options menu. Others are found in the game-select menu prior to launching a game. Still more must be accessed from within the games themselves. There are a lot of options in total, so it mostly makes sense not to house them all under one menu. Still, graphical options like visual filters should really be selectable from other places besides the in-game menu. It took me a while to find them so that I could turn off scanlines, which are on by default, and must be disabled/adjusted for each game individually. Also, emulation-wise, players only get a single quick save slot to use between all 7 games on the collection. That's stingy. On the plus side, each game has a few widescreen border options, which is cool.
Fighting Games
This collection includes the following competitive fighting games:
- X-Men: Children of the Atom (1994)
- Marvel Super Heroes (1995)
- X-Men vs. Street Fighter (1996)
- Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter (1997)
- Marvel vs. Capcom (1998)
- Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (2000)
Several of these games have never received perfect home ports before, and some of the best ports were only released on the Sega Saturn in Japan. The Xbox 360 era did see good ports of Marvel vs. Capcom 1 and 2, but not the older titles. It’s a real blessing to get perfect ports of all six of these licensed fighting games, complete with online play and high-quality netcode. Players can choose from the American or Japanese versions of each title (the Japanese version of Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter has an extra character, pictured above) and enable easy selection of secret characters like Cyber Akuma.
While the online multiplayer menus are pretty clunky, the actual matchmaking options are impressive. Players can choose which games to matchmake for, so you can look for a match in just a single game or make yourself available for any combination of the included titles. Players can also choose between waiting on a matchmaking screen, playing single-player, or browsing the museum while waiting for matches. The matchmaking feature for the Steam version was semi-broken at launch, but it has since been fixed.