Marvel vs Capcom History: X-Men vs Street Fighter

Marvel vs Capcom History: X-Men vs Street Fighter

Robert Lewis Knuckles III

“An Unexpected Crossover”

Back with another Marvel vs Capcom History this time we talk about a crossover game that we never thought would happen and that's Capcom’s X-Men vs. Street Fighter. X-Men vs Street Fighter is a 2D fighting game that features Marvel’s own X-Men and Capcom’s own Street Fighter. It was released for the arcades in 1996. It was also ported to the Sega Saturn in 1997 and ported to the playstation in 1998 but I would strongly suggest you stay away from that version.

With the success of both X-Men Children of The Atom and Marvel Super Heroes Capcom decided to raise the bar higher by putting two universes together. During that time in the 90’s the X-Men tv show was doing extremely well and the Street Fighter series was super popular. The X-Men side featured most characters from Children of the Atom such as Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Magneto and Juggernaut all with some new moves. They are joined by new X-Men characters Rogue, Gambit and Sabertooth. The X-Men characters play like how you would imagine for example Rogue has the ability to drain her opponent's power and gain one of their moves so you can see Rouge performing a Hadoken for a short time.

The Street Fighter side has their Alpha sprites with Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Cammy Charlie, Zangief, Dhalsim, M. Bison and Akuma. All of their special moves are updated for example Ryu’s Hadoken is a huge and the Shinku Hadoken shoots like a Kamehameha wave.

The gameplay in X-Men vs. Street Fighter shares features from the past Marvel games such as super jump and air combos and it runs a bit faster but the biggest feature is the tag team feature. (This feature is gone in the PlayStation version.) Players can choose two characters for insane tag team battles. The objective is to finish off your opponents two characters. Players can tag in their partner anyone they want. A really cool feature is the Variable Combination that has both player’s characters performing their Hyper Combo. I mean seeing Ryu can Cyclops performing their Hyper Combo doesn’t get any cooler than that.

The boss in X-Men vs Street Fighter is the first mutant Apocalypse. He’s actually not really a hard boss but what makes the game really interesting is that the character that defeats Apocalypse plays that character and fights their teammate for the final fight and get their ending.

X-Men vs. Street Fighter was the start of something very special for the future of crossover games. You could only dream of seeing Ryu fighting Wolverine or Magneto teaming up with M. Bison. Back in those games arcade games were very popular. They were full of people and back then you didn’t need to be great at fighting games people just really enjoyed seeing X-Men and Street Fighter together in one game. They even had toys and a comic to help promote this game.

Now a days X-Men vs Street Fighter might be seen at some arcades but mostly people download this arcade game as an emulator or rom. I would love to see this game remastered but with the current issue with Fox and not letting people use their characters I doubt we’ll see that happen.