Fighting fans rejoice, Capcom has engineered the pinnacle of beat-em-up madness. Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is the fourth instalment of the well established Vs. series. Featuring 3 on 3 tag team battles with up to 56 characters (32 hidden) to pick from. Everyone from X-men COTA, Marvel Super Heroes, X-men Vs. Street fighter, Marvel Vs. Street fighter and Marvel Vs. Capcom are here, plus a few new faces. An extremely flexible game engine allows 300 hit combos and delayed interchangeable hyper co ... more >>

Fighting fans rejoice, Capcom has engineered the pinnacle of beat-em-up madness. Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is the fourth instalment of the well established Vs. series. Featuring 3 on 3 tag team battles with up to 56 characters (32 hidden) to pick from. Everyone from X-men COTA, Marvel Super Heroes, X-men Vs. Street fighter, Marvel Vs. Street fighter and Marvel Vs. Capcom are here, plus a few new faces. An extremely flexible game engine allows 300 hit combos and delayed interchangeable hyper combos. Over the top, but very enjoyable.

The Capcom Street fighter series is famous worldwide and is probably the game that popularised the genre. We've been subjected / treated to countless sequels, prequels and spin-offs. This means that over the last ten years Capcom has refined and tweaked the gameplay to near perfection. Also, there are millions of people across the globe that still play these games to the nth degree.

Multi-player gaming is the future. Although slow off the mark, Sega and Capcom both realise this and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 supports Internet play. With the concept of toll-free Internet access slowly becoming a reality the days of global arcades are almost upon us. Imagine ranking events, or one ultimate scoreboard, or even just decent, endless challenges. In fact you have to use v-points collected from Internet battles to unlock secret characters, nice. So whether its mates round after the pub happily button bashing or playing Mr. Technical-San from Japan, this game is sweet.

Although the gameplay is still 2-d, the backgrounds are now in luscious 3-d eye candy which blend seamlessly with the action. The dreamcast is almost identical to Sega's scalable Naomi arcade board so you can expect high-resolution graphics with bi-linear filtering and anti-aliasing. You can even plug your controllers and VMU's into the arcade machine.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 was released at the same time as the arcade version, which makes pleasant change. This game makes all the people that longed for arcade perfect conversions seem awfully short-sighted, this is a lot better.

The combo system takes a little getting used to, but with timing and practice you'll soon be impressing yourself. You can do a jump-in combo, into a dashing ground combo, cancel into a special move, cancel into a super move, cancel into your 2nd characters super, cancel into your 3rd characters super, then off the ground combo, air launcher, mid-air combo, and finally a mid-air finisher, whew.

With literally millions of possible team combinations, Marvel 2 has more depth than the Atlantic Ocean. It's More fun than naked Twister and £3000 cheaper than buying the arcade. If you're into fighting games, Marvel 2 is pure class. << less