Game: X-Men vs. Street Fighter
Year Released: 1998
Platform: PS1



Sometimes I have a hard time picking a game from my collection to review for Throwback Thursday. However, when I found this one again the other day, I wondered why I hadn’t used it yet. X-Men vs. Street Fighter, the spiritual precursor to the insanely popular (and super rare) Marvel vs. Capcom series, seemed like the perfect game to review. Everyone at the office gathered around and took turns playing it. However, it didn’t quite meet expectations.

It should be said that I’m no expert when it comes to fighting games. I enjoy a good Mortal Kombat or DOA match-up once in awhile, but I’m more of a button-masher than anything else. That doesn’t mean I don’t have fun while playing fighting games, but I want to be able to jump into them without knowing every single button combination and secret code. This is not the game for that.



As stated, X-Men vs. Street Fighter is a 2-D fighting game featuring stars from both the Capcom fighting series and the Marvel superheroes. Each player picks one main fighter, and one secondary one, from the available list. The PS1 version was a port of the original arcade game, but due to the system’s limited power, some of the features of the original were removed, such as the ability to switch back and forth between tag team members at will. This makes picking a second character feel kind of useless, since you’ll rarely (if ever) get to use them.

The graphics are nice looking in an appealing comic-book style, not exactly pushing the system to the limits, but not terrible. The load times between fights are downright ridiculous, though. I understand that this is a ten-year-old game, but when it loads so long that you’re ready to turn off your system because you think it’s frozen, that’s when it gets a little out of control.



The controls, in the most basic sense, are easy to figure out if you’ve ever played a fighting game before, but it’ll take a lot of practice (or reading the internets) to figure out the advanced button combinations. It’s always best to have a friend to play against when it comes to this game. Playing against the computer can be downright frustrating. No matter how many moves you know, he knows more, and will use them relentlessly.

Sometimes games are just not as good as you remember them being. X-Men vs. Street Fighter is fun enough, if you have a friend to play with. It captures simple but pretty comic book graphics, and hey, it’s not broken. It is, however, severely lacking in the addictive quality of the original arcade version, and just doesn’t feel polished and complete as a whole. Although it’s entertaining in small doses, X-Men vs. Street Fighter lacks the kind of replay value you would want a big-name game like this to have.