Even though LargeLobster and Jason both recommended against picking up the 360 version of Marvel vs Capcom 2 when it was originally released, I ended up going for it anyways since I realized there’s a trick for buying a Live Arcade game once for two different people. $15 total for my brother and me to have the game on each of our systems? I’ve bought worse I thought, so I pulled the trigger. After playing it a few rounds with my brother and seeing online, I think I’m already done with it and should have followed LargeLobster’s advice by simply breaking it out on the DC to relive my nostalgia, even with my lack of arcade sticks on the DC.
Here is what transpired over the two hours of my brother and me playing once we bought the game:
1. My brother and I gleefully pick all sorts of teams from the 56 characters and spar, reliving our nostalgia with various characters
2. We begin settling on main teams that we would use for online play – my team being: Omega Red, Cyclops, and Doctor Doom, and his being Amingo, Iceman, and Cable.
3. We continue playing with our main teams against each other for a while until I’m done being flattened by him and he feels confident enough to play unranked online.
4. He joins his first Player match against another player who also mains with Amingo, and gets taken out without the other player even losing a guy.
5. He joins another game with several people in the room, and we witness one guy who picks Magneto, Sentinel and Storm and practically gets a perfect against the other guy with just Magneto.
6. We leave the room, and turn off the game.
7. We don’t speak of Marvel vs Capcom 2 again.
In our little time playing the game, we didn’t notice any of the glitches that Jason mentioned - but of course, we never played it as competitively as Jason did (or does?). What was evident to me was that I was along LargeLobster’s mindset: the game is just too ridiculously crazy. It’s too fast, there’s too much stuff going on, and then the game is over. Maybe in my youth, I would have kept up better, but now I feel like an old geezer trying to not only attack the opponent, but throw out my assist characters, deal with the opponent’s assist characters, air combo, throw supers, etc. My brother fared better due to his innate fighting game skill, but even he seemed to indicate to me that this was one game he didn’t have the patience to get competitive with.
I guess this game’s “re-release” really appeals to two groups of people: those that were competitive players of the game in the first place, and those that just love the characters and want to play for fun. It’s when the two sides meet that things get ugly – and now they can meet thanks to online play. For us, we were opened up to the hardcore side immediately, scaring us away from the game potentially for good. My nostalgia with Marvel vs Capcom 2 is over, brutally destroyed by Magneto. There are people that have played this game for almost a decade!
