There was some deserved hype surrounding Capcom’s first Fighting Collection, preserving the best of Street Fighter and Darkstalkers, and including a delicious Red Earth bonus for good measure. The furore across the internet upon the announcement of the Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, however, seemed to burn twice as bright.

Featuring seven titles, there’s nothing but gold across the board. It includes every pixel-drawn Marvel fighting game up to and including Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and all arcade originals. Capcom has ploughed the package with bonuses, from beautifully defined CRT filters and music players to original arcade art galleries, region switching, superb training modes, save states, and 4:3 screen bezels. For online play, Capcom's own rollback netcode is present and working fluidly. Although we can’t comment on how it will hold up when the servers go global, we’re optimistic it will be well maintained. You can hop in and out of matches, take on casual and ranked match-ups, and spectate freely. It’s quite the fighting festival, and buffed to a shine.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Capcom's first foray into the Marvel universe — and the collection's surprise bonus — is 1993's The Punisher, a terrific Final Fight-style belt scroller. This marks its first ever true arcade port (the Mega Drive version being heavily cut down) and allows two players to team up online as either Frank Castle or Nick Fury. Wonderfully un-PC, it’s both masochistically violent and incredibly tactile. It’s fantastic to play, looks great, and should be enough to tip any fence-sitter onto the side of a purchase.

Capcom’s foresight in picking up the Marvel license in the '90s, long before the explosion of the MCU, wasn’t wasted. In 1994 it released X-Men: Children of the Atom for arcades, applying the Street Fighter roadmap to Marvel’s favourite mutant league. Full of ultra-cool comic book visual panache, this X-Men-focused brawler features several playable mutants, including Wolverine, Cyclops, Colossus, and Psylocke, as well as Magneto, Sentinel, and neat additions like Silver Samurai and Omega Red. Despite its traditional one-on-one system, it comes with flashy Hyper Combo attacks of variable depths and properties, super jumps, and subsequent Aerial Raves, as well as a limber recovery roll system. It’s very intriguing for fans of this particular Marvel IP, and an Akuma secret battle can be unlocked if you fulfil several strict requirements.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

With the first of the famed crossovers still just around the corner, Marvel Super Heroes arrived in 1995. This entry is based loosely on The Infinity Gauntlet saga, with Thanos as antagonist, and Infinity Gems that can be won from your opponent during bouts - gems that provide your character with powered up states and special abilities depending on their property. It’s also the title where, in a series famed for its chaotic nature, things started to get really raucous. With 13 playable characters drawn from Marvel lore, including the likes of Juggernaut, Captain America, Spider-Man, and Iron Man, it positively blazes, building upon the framework of its predecessor and informing things to come.

With the rapidity of three games in three years, one can consider Capcom’s Marvel fighting games an ongoing work in progress. 1996 saw the first Street Fighter crossover title in X-Men vs. Street Fighter, drawing back characters from Children of the Atom. New additions like Gambit and Rogue made their debut, pitted against Capcom’s finest in Ryu, Ken, Chun-li, Cammy, M. Bison, and others. It’s also beholden to that infamous, screen-dwarfing Apocalypse boss fight. While continuing with existing conventions like the super jump, Aerial Rave, and Hyper Combo gauge-fuelled special attacks, this was the game that introduced the tag team battle, restricting the action to a single, explosive round. Tagging your characters in and out of the fight is heavily strategic, allowing the relegated fighter to regain some of their health over time. Tagging a character can also be done at pivotal moments, adding an additional strike to a combo; and it’s possible to expend the Hyper Gauge in combined simultaneous super attacks.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Everything is amped here, with your regular Street Fighter’s fireballs pumped up several times their regular volume. With the establishing of the ‘Magic Sequence’ — a flexible combo chain rumoured to have been prototyped in the original Darkstalkers — it was here that Capcom cemented the basics for what their Marvel crossovers would continue to feed off, and it remains an incredible two-player experience.

1997’s Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, then, is much like the previous game but with assorted Marvel characters (many of whom were present in Marvel Super Heroes) rather than just X-Men. It uses the same tag battle, single-round system, and comes with increasingly jaw-dropping animation and some of the most beautiful pixel art ever burned onto a ROM chip. The soundtrack is great and the overall vibe has a real party atmosphere.

What’s new here is the Variable Assist, allowing you to tag in your additional character to engage momentarily with a super attack, before leaping back out again. With this, you can create new and powerful combo mix-ups and deal additional damage without totally swapping out characters. This key function would go on to be a staple of the series. Additionally, joke secret character Norimaro — a kind of super-nerd pastiche originally created by Japanese comedian Noritake Kinashi — is here after being removed from earlier localisations of the game due to rights owned by Nippon TV. This is the first time he’s officially been playable outside of Japan.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

In 1998 Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes was a kind of culmination, despite having sequels thereafter. Here, Capcom drew on characters from its own universe, including Captain Commando, Morrigan, Strider, and Mega Man, to go up against Marvel’s finest. There are 15 playable characters, with an addition of 20 “Special Partners”. This entry continues the tag team battle system, but adds the ‘Variable Cross’, a variation on the previous game’s Variable Assist. Now, after you’ve chosen your primary duo, you’re assigned a random (if you don’t cheat) Special Partner — anyone from Arthur from Ghosts 'n Goblins to Jubilee from X-Men — and these can be called on a limited number of times to deal an additional strike.

This, a third tier of strategy, acts like a bridging tool. You can engage a combo and then using the Variable Cross to create an additional link in the chain that allows that combo to be extended. The possibilities balloon, making this particular entry one of the most beloved by combo technicians and fighting game diehards. It looks and sounds beautiful, the cast is wonderful, but above all else, it’s strategically deep as the hills.

Finally, Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes was released in 2000, bringing with it a new art-style and 3D backgrounds. Created with Sega’s Naomi (Dreamcast) arcade hardware, it was the last of the 2D sprite-based crossovers, and the one fans have been begging to see on modern consoles more than any other. Here, your tag team now consists of three characters from a dizzying roster of 56 fully-fledged combatants ranging from the far-flung corners of Marvel and Capcom's universes. This entry brings back the Variable Assist system from Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter over the Variable Cross partner assist from the previous game. But with three characters, the tagging and sustaining of your team for defence becomes deeper, and each character has three optional types of assists: Anti-Air, Capture, and Enhance. Depending on the character, these provide assists based on attack, defence, and even healing. The game also throws out the six-button control scheme for a simpler four button arrangement, while providing two dedicated assist buttons to engage your teammates in the wings.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Considered by many to be the best of the series and one of the greatest fighting games of all time, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is a fanfare like few others. Today, with its new lease of life online, the servers will be roaring for years to come.

Conclusion

There is a decade of gaming evolution here, including what is arguably the pinnacle of Capcom's fighting game craft. Perfectly preserved and presented, everything is beautifully formed and wonderful to play. Assembled with real clarity in regards to fan expectation, Capcom has thoroughly delivered the goods, from its ton of bonus features to its rollback netcode, with years' worth of combative nuance to explore, learn, and exact in the online arena. Oh, and The Punisher is awesome, too.

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Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics
Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics

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