Platform: Playstation 2

Genre: Fighting

Publisher: Capcom

Developer: Capcom

ESRB: T (Teen)

Released: Q4 2001

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Pros: 

- 44 playable characters

- Some variety to match-up and handicapping system

- Cool new backgrounds/vistas

Cons:

- Downright awful looking characters

- Voice acting continues to change between versions

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"A decent fighting game that really could have used a little more shining before being shipped."

With the Playstation 2 having been out for more than a year, one would expect a veritable flood of fighting games. Unfortunately (for fighting enthusiasts) there have been few on the PS2, but those that have come out have been amazing (Street Fighter EX 3 and Tekken: Tag Tournament to name two). With the popularity of the first Capcom vs. SNK game (released only in arcades and on the Dreamcast), it was inevitable that a sequel was going to be made and then ported to every console. Capcom vs. SNK 2 (like all the other vs. titles) holds a slew of characters to choose from – Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Samurai Showdown, Fatal Fury, and a bunch of other games that I’ve never heard of or played. Most of the action in the game occurs with 3 person teams, although there are a few exceptions that will be explained later.

Because of the wide variety of characters (and games that they come from), a few additions have been implemented. These changes are not new to the title specifically, but to people who didn’t play Capcom vs. SNK 1. The biggest additions are the “groove system” and the “ratio system”. The groove system not only determines how a character gauges up (gets more P.O.’d) but how the game plays – hopping, ducking, mid-air blocking, countering, quick-recovery… and so on and so forth. You can either select a groove from the pre-made list, each of which comes from a specific game, or you can 

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create your own and take aspects of each game that you like. The ratio system is a way of choosing how to distribute power to your team of characters - you have 4 points to divvy up between up to 3 characters (you can have 1 powerhouse, or 2 pretty strong people, or 1 pretty strong person with 2 average people… the choices go on and on). Sure, a powerhouse may be able to dominate any opponent but a tactician could slowly chip away at their health with a group of bodies/sacrificial lambs.

Game play is decent – nothing really special here. As with most games it’s more fun to play against someone than it is to play the one player mode despite the variety in gaming styles (ratio matches, straight-up 3 person teams, survival matches, singles tournament, normal tournament…). The first thing that I noticed once the game loaded was how grainy the characters looked – it was so bad that I actually took the disc out of the tray and cleaned the disk (despite the utter lack of dust on it). It was a good 15 minutes until I realized that it was “supposed” to look that way. It’s a big mistake to have messed up visuals on a game of this type. What are you buying the game for besides the action and looks? Another annoyance is the stark differences in how the characters were animated – the characters from Samurai Showdown look like they were redesigned to work with Street Fighter Alpha, but Blanka looks completely unlike all of the other Street Fighter characters. It would have been better to keep all characters looking uniform, the style changes just don’t look right. The other big concern has got to be the voice acting, I don’t think that it’s asking too much to keep the same voice actors (or just re-use old sound bytes if they are unavailable) between versions of the game – Cammy is on her 5 actress at least between different versions of Street Fighter and Vs. games.

How do the characters from different games match up? Some fit really well. The King of Fighters games have a nice balance between speed and power and work well with the Street Fighter characters, but the Samurai Showdown characters are all power and just get chewed up during the course of a match. It’s like a match between Zangief and anybody – connect once and they’re screwed, but otherwise you’re dead.

All in all, you end up with a decent fighting game that really could have used a little more shining before being shipped.

- Tazman

(January 26, 2002)

How could someone penetrate my impenetrable fortress? – Dr. Weird

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