Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics - Time to dust off the moves of yesteryear

The preservation of video games is an issue that always comes up at the slightest provocation. Digital stores have shown us that they are not forever and what to say about licensing. When it comes to something as big as Marvel, we imagine that it is not so easy to maintain. Fortunately, Capcom has already become adept at doing their homework and creating compilations that bring back the feeling we had when we put the last chip in the arcade. A golden era of nostalgia is back with Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection.

Let’s take a ride (into the past)

The Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics is, as the name suggests, a collection of fighting games that came to arcades in the 90s. At a time when Capcom was one of the great exponents with its Street Fighter, the collaboration with Marvel fell into their hands. A series of fighting games featuring characters from the House of Ideas were released. How it evolved and grew to the point where it became a crossover game is an almost historical event that this collection reflects. From the X-Men, to a wider Marvel group, to the beginning of the crossover with the big fight between Ryu and Cyclops. And the rest is history.

As a good title that gathers a collection of titles, we have the option to start the game and select one of the 7 titles to choose from, 6 within this line of fighting games, as well as a very special and special Beat ‘em up:

To be able to access all these titles from a simple collection is something that hasn’t been available for a long time, and unless you had consoles and the physical versions in good condition, it wasn’t something you could legally access as easily. You can tweak details like appearance, borders, and so on. The most important detail is that the games come out exactly as you remember them, and even versions you may not have played, because just as the American version comes out, so does the Japanese version. There is the option to adjust the difficulty, the number of levels, or even the secret characters, depending on each of the games, allowing the player to create their own arcade experience at home.

As a good collection, we will also find a museum that will have the classic art galleries of the games, which include from concept art, to scenarios and characters, art for advertising, development documents and others. On the other hand, there are also music files to listen to all the soundtracks of the games. There is also a kind of gallery related to the achievements that you can get by playing the different titles that this collection offers.

Among the changes and tweaks coming to the game are some quality of life features we’ve seen in similar collections. The Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics features quick save points, which are very useful for going back in time and having easier encounters, or if you just need to pause or change your game. Other new features go towards accessibility issues, from button configurations that make control more simplified (for example, with one button to do an lvl 1 or lvl 3 special without marking the entire sequence).

Another aspect to highlight is the training option. If you were an arcade terror and want to practice your combos or just try out the buttons before jumping into the game, you can use this option. All fighting games have a training mode that can show you the hitboxes of all characters, so you can calculate where a neutral, a weak fist, a strong kick from below and continue the combo.

Before the crossover fights, there was The Punisher

Aside from replaying those titles that took a few coins out of our young wallets at some point, The Punisher stands out as the only one that is not a fighting game, but a beat-em-up, and curiously, it is a game whose main characters (Punisher and Nick Fury) never appeared in the rest of the collection. The game is a prequel to the whole series of fighting games, coming out just one year before X-Men: Children of the Atom. Its level of violence is very particular, since in addition to clean punches and the use of some weapons such as baseball bats, knives or pipes, our anti-heroes even used pistols and machine guns to help them fight the Kingpin.

Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics is a title that manages to bring back one of the eras that can bring the most nostalgia to the generation that grew up in the 90s, with a series of fighting games that were the cornerstone of everything that could be expected in the genre in the future. The collection does a good job of offering material that allows us to enjoy the game a little more, and its quality-of-life improvements help to pick up the pace or even teach a new generation how to play.