Capcom Fighting Jam - Cut and Paste Adventures

For those who are unaware, I do happen to enjoy fighting games quite a bit and have owned several over the years from several iterations of Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Guilty Gear, Tekken and more. I also happen to be okay at them though I am nowhere near tournament level on anything. Why am I going through this? Because its a darn sight more interesting than explaining my way through this game. I will at least give it a try though...

First let me point you towards the date on that title. 2004. To put this in a perspective, Capcom vs SNK 2 was released in 2001 and contained 48 characters. Marvel vs Capcom 2 was released the year before that with 56 characters (55 if you don't count 'Bone Wolverine' which quite frankly, I don't). This meanwhile was released 2004 and contains only 19 characters and 2 boss characters (which are hidden in the screenshot), count them. Its just shocking, especially given the large amount of cutting and pasting graphics-wise.

That's three characters based from Street Fighter II (and Ryu because Capcom pretends the first game doesn't exist), three from Street Fighter III (and Chun-Li because heaven forbid Capcom leave out their leading lady), four from Darkstalkers, three from Street Fighter Alpha/Zero (and Guy because Final Fight is now Street Fighter) and four from Warzard. Her in the centre? The lone 'new' character to the game 'Ingrid'. Oh and the Bosses? Pyron from Darkstalkers and Akuma (Because heaven forbid Capcom leave out him from any crossover ever).

With that unpleasant area aside, theres also a severe lack of modes. We get arcade, vs, training and... that's it. No survival, edit modes or anything that took time to make. Already the game looks like a bad MUGEN port (MUGEN being a fighting game dev kit). It gets worse though when we hit the game.

Here is Ryu vs Demitri. Notice the problem immediately? Yep. The game looks terrible in many ways. First is the horrid sprite-ripping done by Capcom who, decided for some reason to rip sprites straight from each characters respective games. This basically leads to horrible situations where old and stiff Darkstalkers sprites are placed side-by-side with the more fluid Street Fighter III ones. The backgrounds too look washed out throughout and for the most part are quite dull.



But that's really minor when we hit the real issue of the game and that is an overall sense of unfair. The main gimmick here is that each character has their respective 'System' from their own series. This is a bad idea, especially when certain systems have much more in the way of features and powers than the others. Take these two again for instance. Ryu has the Street Fighter II system which leaves him with one hard to fill super bar, no tech-rolls or cancels and little in the way of any special defense. Now we have Demitri who has a fast-filling super bar that can fill up to 5 times, he can throw out follow up attacks to knocked-down players, can charge up his normal supers into much better ones by using meter and can use many other tactics.

Its no surprise then that the game is so unbalanced. Basically if you do see this in CEX or some other gaming store, looking forlorn and unloved. There is a good reason. There is also a good reason Capcom pretends this game never happened.