The Capcom Fighting Collection is a compilation of the best games from the golden age of fighting games, appealing to nostalgia and coming at just the right time. We played it on PC from Steam and we tell you what we thought.
capcom is one of the strongest and most historic companies in the video game industry. I create beat’em up classics like Final Fight, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs or Captain Commando. He got into hack’n slash with titles like Devil May Cry Y Onimusha. If we talk about survival horrors, they not only created the jewel called Dino Crisisbut they are the parents of resident Evil. In fighting games street-fighter It is the initial axis of this saga of classics. And, recalling this genre, is how it arrives Capcom Fighting Collection.
Capcom has already released some fighting game compilations, but they were never well received.. The main problem resided in the selection of titles. On the one hand, you had company tanks, games that were undisputed successes, and on the other hand, those games that weren’t bad, but, so to speak, passed unnoticed alongside the others.
When you set the bar so high with one of the games, the others, no matter how good they are, end up being inferior. Therefore, the main complaints were that the players always ended up playing the same game, and that the rest, therefore, felt that they were “extra”.
With Capcom Fighting Collection this does not happen, since we have a delicate selection of the golden age of fighting games. We are looking at 10 games from the CPS2 board era, dating from the mid-90s to early 2000s. Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors (1994), Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge (1995), Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire (1997), Vampire Hunter 2: Darkstalkers’ Revenge (1997), Vampire Savior 2: The Lord of Vampire ( 1997), Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (1996), Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix (1997), Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness (1995), Red Earth (1996) and the great Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition (2003). As you can see, American and Japanese versions of the titles are also included.
And in some very strange way, if you’re a gamer away from emulation, this title feels pretty fresh. Because if we stop to think, Capcom has been having a pretty significant decline regarding fighting games. Just emphasizing street-fighterthe rest of the titles that came out felt like a rehash: Capcom vs. Marvel vs. Street Fighter vs.and next to it, to the left of the vs, different franchises.
But in the game itself, there was not something innovative, something tacit that the player feels as new. Unlike what capcom is achieving with resident Evilthose who really love fighting games stopped putting their hopes in the company, and perhaps look at other horizons, such as those proposed Arc System Worksfor instance.
And that’s where the Capcom Fighting Collection can earn a little place in people’s hearts.: because even though it’s old games, it’s a pretty conscious selection of them. And it is that, among those that are proposed, there is an important difference in gameplay.
Yes, there are people who say that all fighting games are the same, that they are not original and that they fail to innovate. Let’s leave those people aside, Capcom Fighting Collection uses fighting games like Street Fighter, Darkstalkers either cyberbots (all very different from each other), but also brings us a Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and a Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix enough to completely change the landscape.
It will be that perhaps those games, between the last half of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, they raised an emotion in the players that newer games, wrapped in another context and with other searches, did not achieve. And it is that when you spend some time playing several games, both offline and online, you feel that magic touch that supposes creativity, imagination, that desire to generate something new, but just as great as what was already done, and even, better. Sometimes we feel that this extreme love for retro is due, in large part, to all this.
The timing, at least, is very well managed. At a time when expectations for Street Fighter 6 are sky high, Capcom releases this compilation. Whether it’s to calm the waters, or to generate more emotion, subtlety is appreciated. The game comes out on a date very close to the release of DNF Duelanother work of Arc System Workswhich is based on Dungeon and Fighter, a mega popular action RPG, especially in the East. The game did not have the reception that was expected, and contrary to what many thought, it did not go head to head with Capcom Fighting Collectionbecause, although both rest on the same genre, the proposals are completely different.
The only place where the game feels ordinary, so to speak, is that beyond its extras (the music of all the games and images that range from character design to scans of the internal books or covers), the game is nothing more than an emulator with a couple of ROMs. The menu does not have a great design job, on any of its screens. In fact, in some of them, everything feels quite archaic.
Since today’s monitors are 16:9 and arcade screens back then were 4:3, the frames that fill the screen they are almost the same as those we can see in any of these RetroArch, Retropie, Recalbox or Batocera style systems, among many others. In fact, these systems bring filters and improvements so that the games look much better, which capcom not included in this build and the pixels look pretty big.
But this is already a matter of taste and comfort. The Capcom Fighting Collection is a direct hit on nostalgia, and it works just as well as Konami’s Castlevania Advance Collection.. Hours and hours of fighting guaranteed, against friends or even against people around the world. Classic games that we’ve already spent hours and hours on in the arcades, now compiled into one product.
It is like a trophy of those that we dust off after many years when we return to visit our parents’ house, and that we can put in a showcase, next to the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, that beautiful compilation that brought 12 titles from the saga.
RELEASE DATE | June 24, 2022 |
DEVELOPER | CAPCOM Co., Ltd. |
DISTRIBUTOR | CAPCOM Co., Ltd. |
PLATAFORMS | PC, Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch |