There was fierce excitement in the @rcade over the weekend when we caught our first glimpse of the trailer for Marvel versus Capcom 3. We drooled over superb graphics, excellent and goose bumping producing fight scenes and combat and were more than happy to see some of our favourite Capcom and Marvel characters back to kick some serious ass.
The Marvel and Capcom fighter games have been around now for almost fifteen years and it’s really not hard to see why. The series first kicked off with X-men vs. Street Fighter, released to arcades around the world in September 1996.
It was the very first game to bring together a ‘tag team’ format – the player selects two characters to fight with and while they can only control one character at a time, if the first character loses then their teammate is immediately swapped out to fight in their stead. You are also able to swap out characters at anytime, allowing you to mix up your gameplay and to throw your computer or player controlled opponents off balance.
Playable characters included, Ryu, Chun Li, Ken and Zangief as well as others from the Street Fighter games and Cyclops, Storm, Rogue and Wolverine as all as other characters from the X-Men series. The game was then released for the Sega Saturn in 1997 and then the PlayStation the year after but unfortunately the ‘tag team’ system was dropped from the PS version because of problems with limited memory.
One more sequel was to follow before the games became titled Marvel vs. Capcom. Released for the Sega Saturn, Arcade machines and PlayStation, ‘Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter’ battled it’s way to our consoles in 1998 (Sega Saturn) and 1999 (PS). The same system carried on from the prequel, the only real changes came in the characters, Cammy and Charlie were swapped for Sakura and Dan while the Marvel team only kept two of the first games characters, Cyclops and Wolverine replacing the rest with others like Spider-Man, the Hulk and Captain America.
In 1999 we got our first glimpse of the Marvel vs. Capcom series in all of its new glory – released for the Dreamcast in November of that year; it got a PlayStation release the following year. It had two new features to it as well some new characters. To begin with you could now ‘Dual Attack’ by taking control of both characters for a short period of time and beat your opponent into a bloody pulp with twice as many super powers. The assist function from the previous game was also altered for the new game; you could now summon your randomly chosen partner only a limited number of times to back you up.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 followed on only a few months after its predecessor for a Dreamcast release in 2000. It made its way to the PlayStation 2 in 2002 and is now one of the most popular and downloaded games on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. With 56 characters to choose from the Marvel and Capcom universes you were spoiled for choice. It also featured the ability to ‘snapback’, allowing you to force your opponent to swap out characters against their will.
With the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 you were also able to go online and challenge friends and other games from around the world.
Hours, days, weeks and months of our lives have been spent on this franchise – Marvel vs. Capcom dug its claws into a generation of gamers and has yet to let go. With frantic combos and insane attacks combined with the mutant and superhuman abilities as well the powerful hand to hand combat arts of the street fighters continues to blow our minds. With some of the most colourful and extroverted graphics we’ve ever feasted upon, we didn’t think the series could in fact get any better…
Boy were we wrong…
There has been no official release date given from Marvel vs. Capcom 3 aside from Spring 2011 – but we’ve heard that this is the first in the series to actually contain a proper story arc. Its predecessors did have small stories and character backgrounds but, M vs. C 3: Fate of Two Worlds looks set to change all the rules. Confirmed characters to date include, Ryu, Wolverine, Felicia, Dante, Deadpool, Hulk and Morrigan Aensland.
If we could invent a stasis machine to pass the time so we don’t have to wait for the release we would but it looks like we are just going to have to bide our time and maybe look into that stasis machine…
