Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics [PS4, 2024]

These are great fighting games. Truly terrific fighting games. From a golden era of sprite-based craft and technical innovation, they've spent far too long gated off behind expensive gimmick cabinets and ownership conflicts. 

But here they are, all of Capcom's "Marvel" and "Versus" fighting games released between 1994 and 2000 in one collection. You've got;

X-Men: Children of the Atom (stubborn and janky now, but looks gorgeous and is pure innovation and influence) 

Marvel Superheroes (sublime refinement of COTA, masterful art and animation, great use of Thanos/the Infinity Stones and one of the best fighting games ever made) 

X-Men vs Street Fighter (wild tag-team action with the Street Fighter cast at their most overpowered)

Marvel Superheroes vs Street Fighter (the weakest of the bunch, but still glorious, technicolour carnage and the first in the series to use "assists") 

Marvel vs Capcom (pushing 2v2 fighting to the limit and full of brilliant character imaginings) 

Marvel vs Capcom 2 (3 vs 3 gameplay, enormous roster of characters, batshit chaos incarnate, responsible for decades of injokes) 

You can also play the Capcom side-scrolling brawler, "The Punisher", but no-one wants to hear about that. 

The collection uses the same interface and framework as 2022's "Capcom Fighting Collection". Clean, simple presentation, with options, music player and development sketches for each game. Optional graphical filters allow recreation of arcade scanlines for a further nostalgia hit.

As a concession to a modern, pad-using audience, it's possible to map special moves and commands to single buttons. It's not as fleshed out as other modern fighting games, but is still a welcome move towards accessibility and inclusion. 

Each game has a training mode, which lets you practice moves and combos with no time or life limits. This mode also includes a hitbox viewer and options for dummy behaviour. This is a first for some of these titles.  

There's "rollback" netcode for stable online play (for all games!) and unlike the previous collection, you can queue multiple titles for an online match at once, and then play/train until a challenger connects. 

If you're new/scared and reluctant to jump online, the single-player mode offers game-level challenges embedded - providing some goals and guidance to the newbie player that didn't exist back in the day. 

This title is a wonderful portal back to gaming in the mid-to-late 90s, to a time of arcade supremacy and the 2D pixel-art arms race.  Here you play the games by playing them. No grinding, no gear, no wannabe Peter Jackson cinematic story modes. Pick a game, pick a character and fight until you win or lose. 

It's been a delight to watch these games in action again. Old heads flexing a quarter-century of dual hyper combo muscle memory, online influencers embracing the titles in front of their huge audiences, while tactics, combos and match video appear across social media, in a way unimaginable at the time.  

There are some minor UI shortfalls -- there's one save state for the whole collection, which will always be weird, and the MvC2 sprite scaling doesn't precisely look like the Dreamcast/Naomi original. 

There's also the brutal truth that these are old, unforgiving games with steep learning curves and a playerbase that may well have been playing longer than you've been alive. There's very little to soften the blow of a loss, no comeback systems or second chances built in. When you lose in MvC2, you really lose.  If you don't want that, you may want to look elsewhere. 

For a selection of games that once seemed like they'd never be rereleased, tangled within the legal maze of Marvel licensing, this is a wonderful release and a great opportunity to play fighting game history. 

In summary: get these games. Get them if you're a hardcore player who was there in the arcades on day 1. Get them if you just want to mash buttons while Spider-Man punches Zangief. Get them if you just liked the stupid memes. Get them if you think it'll send a signal that we want MvC5. Who knows, it might help!