Marvel vs. Capcom 2

If we were Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2, we’d be a bit intimidated. Why? Because in a way, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is the comic-book universe’s real ultimate alliance. It assembles a magnificent pool of 56 Marvel and Capcom characters, and players draw on that to form a three-fighter tag team that’ll punch, kick, and blast the crap out of their rival trio. It was a stellar coin-op in 2000, and it’s still an amazing fighting game in 2009 on Xbox Live Arcade.

Most of the credit goes to multiplayer. When we last saw, MvC2 it was on original Xbox — with no online play. [Shudder.] Thankfully, this XBLA port doesn’t repeat that mistake: in addition to MvC2’s fairly standard single-player game, it adopts the multiplayer code from Capcom’s recent Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and that means silky-smooth bouts over Xbox Live.

The upshot: you and your friends can go nuts in head-to-head matches, pitting, say, Iron Man, Dr. Doom, and Mega Man against Hulk, Chun-Li, and Jill Valentine. With its pared-down control scheme — two punch buttons, two kick buttons, and two assist buttons (each summoning a different partner) — MvC2 is more beginner-friendly than the Street Fighter games. Mashing the punch/kick buttons like a maniac while doing quarter- and half-circles with the analog stick (or better yet, with one of Mad Catz’s superb Street Fighter IV FightSticks) will generally let you pull off at least one special move per character, like Cable’s sweeping Viper Beam or Juggernaut’s trembly Earthquake. And with such flashy, screen-filling attacks, the game’s fun even when you’re seeing just a piece of it.

But MvC2 offers loads of advanced mechanics for players who invest the effort. With practice, you’ll learn when to tag in your teammates; how to execute more moves, including multi-character super-moves; how to do snapbacks (forcing an enemy fighter to swap for a teammate); and other sly strategies that make the game even more fulfilling.

So MvC2 rewards hardcore fighters; we just wish Capcom had better rewarded hardcore fans. Unlike Super Street Fighter II — which also debuted at $15 — this port isn’t an HD remix: the developers have simply smoothed the graphics rather than redrawing them, and the music is tweaked a tad, not fully remixed. Consequently, SSFII looks and sounds superior, and rather than a gorgeous version of MvC2 befitting the Xbox 360, we get one that plays wonderfully but looks dated. Were this an HD remix, it’d be a better value, and with all the blessed brawlin’ goin’ on, we’d be doling out an Editors’ Choice award.