The Biggest Game Project on this Planet

Side-log: Capcom Fighting Jam

Or Capcom Fighting Evolution, whatever.

Ahhhhh. Capcom. Once upon a time, they were the absolute Gods of beat-em-ups, and anything that had the letters "Fight" on it in some form or other, was a guaranteed success!
And for a long time, it was all good, but THEN, Capcom became lazy. They decided that sprites from a game from 1998 were good enough to still be used, many many years later for EVERY new game they make.

And to compensate for lack of evolution, they decided to just throw in tons of characters from different series. The Age of Cross-overs began, and many companies like Marvel and SNK tried their best at a bout of fisticuffs against age-old sprites.
The Marvel vs. Capcom series were great fun, because at least they offered an entirely new way of fighting, which was very frantic and over the top, and even the SNK vs. Capcom series wasn't that bad. Well, the second one wasn't, at least, but it mostly lived off the novelty value of pitching two rival companies against each other.

Now, it has become time for Capcom to take a big step back (how the HELL did they find the guts to put that "Evolution" staple on this game!?), and offer LESS characters, NO selectable fighting styles, and really crappy 2D visuals.
Capcom Fighting Jam features characters from a variety of Capcom games, 4 characters per series, and includes well known characters such as Chun Li (SFIII version), Rose (SF Alpha), Demitri (Darkstalkers), Ryu (SFII Version, and where the hell is Ken?) as well as some that you've probably never heard of, and one entirely new character called Ingrid.

Each character plays like in the game he or she was taken from, and it is not possible to choose alternate versions, which is a huge step back from SNK vs. Capcom 2, where you could even have Ryu play like a Samurai Shodown character if you wanted to.

The character sprites all look absolutely HORRENDOUS. Bald and extremely pixellated characters, lacking color fight against boring STATIC backdrops that look worse than some fighting games from the year 2000 even. Come ON, Capcom! Time to fucking move ON already! At least SNK vs. Capcom 2 had decent 3D backgrounds, but this is ridiculous.
It's like they wanted to make a new game with as little effort as possible, using old sprites, crappy music and a rather unresponsive control system.

With the Guilty Gear series showing that 2D can still look incredibly good, if you just use High defition sprites and put some effort into it, Capcom still seems to think they can get away with the same sprites they used in Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Street Fighter III, which, like I said, ARE FROM THE LAST MILENNIUM. Seriously, check the release dates.

I'm not saying that games are all about graphics, but I AM saying it's stupid and REALLY cheap to be using the same damn sprites forever.

The only positive thing I can think of to say, is that this is, after all, still Street Fighter (mostly), which means you DO get good gameplay, but it's so much lesser quality than we are used to.
Also, the only really nice surprise is that, finally, we get Character Specific endings again. After dozens of fighting games with a crapload of characters, all getting the same ending, you can finally see some nice personalized artwork again, if you play through the incredibly cheap 1p mode again.
There's no real text, just a one-page comic of sorts, but it does look nice, I've always loved Capcom Artwork, and it makes you think what they could do if they tried implementing this kind of graphics FOR IN-GAME, maybe? Assholes.

So what we have here, is a game that is in no way interesting, good-looking or fun, and only lives off its legacies.
Paris Hilton? Yes, that sounds scarily similar.
Yeah, I like that. This game is the Paris Hilton of the Capcom fighting games, a cheap skanky parasite, too lazy to do anything new.
Now, I am going to wait patiently for that sex tape starring Rose.

A 6.5

posted by Ingen! @ 1:13 PM