Franchise Retrospective: X-Men's Gaming Legacy Part 8 -- X-Men vs. Street Fighter

If you accept that X-Men: Children of the Atom was Capcom's next step in a new sub-genre of fighting games, then X-Men vs. Street Fighter was the prefect follow-up. But that's definitely not what people initially took notice of upon seeing the game for the first time. No, what made it stand out was the pure craziness of a crossover between those two franchises. A Marvel and Capcom crossover is pretty commonplace these days, but this game marked the first time something like this ever happened. It was the kind of concept that you could tell your friends about, but they wouldn't believe it until they were able to see it in person, which actually gave us geeks a lot of grief - this was a time before the luxury of DSL/Cable internet, you see.


But it was very real, and the results were superb for the time. X-Men vs. Street Fighter utilizes the gameplay found in both X-Men: CotA and Marvel Super Heroes and expands on it by adding a tag-team function. It sounds like a clever gimmick on paper, but in actuality it does a lot towards spicing the gameplay up and making it even more intense. It's like the perfect addition to its formula, in that while tagging in your partner takes a little practice - mainly, tagging them in when the time is right - it doesn't make the game harder to play at all.

As its title implies, X-Men vs. Street Fighter includes most (probably not all, I'm sure someone's favorites are missing) of your favorite characters from both teams. On the Street Fighter side, expected additions like Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Bison, Zangief, Dhalsim, and Akuma make it in, along with some you probably didn't expect to see like Charlie and Cammy. All of the Street Fighter characters have their Alpha sprites, including Akuma this time, thankfully; though that excludes Cammy, who prior to this game didn't have any (she didn't appear in the Alpha series until Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold). For the X-Men, only Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Juggernaut, and Magneto make it in from COTA, but this game adds Gambit, Rogue, and Sabretooth to make up for them. Apocalypse also makes an appearance as the unplayable final boss.

Inserting the Street Fighter characters into an X-Men world doesn't sound like an easy task, but both games play similarly enough that it's perfectly fitting. Though it's only "fitting" for your tastes if you're willing to accept that this game doesn't have the same amount of depth or complexity as a Street Fighter game. Like CotA before it, it eschews that for a higher sense of fun for people who aren't already attuned to games like that. The result was a game that was a little finicky at times (especially with people who exploit the unbalances in the game), but still remained fun and flashy enough that it attracted casual and hardcore gamers alike.

Character techniques were done in the same way they were in CotA, with only a few characters having anything that required two quarter-circle-forward motions. The only aspect that took getting the hang of was having a partner and knowing when to switch them in. The idea behind having a tag team mechanic was so you could switch in another character after one has taken too much damage, since some of their health can recover while they're away. Switching them at the wrong time could be even more costly, since your character performs a signature taunt after kicking their way in. If your opponent gets hit by the kick, that's fantastic, because it'll send them through the air and leave them vulnerable for a second. But if it's blocked, it can be punished with a devastating combo. It's not exactly an ingenious layer of depth, but one that's welcome, because having players switch without any kind of penalty would be quite horrible.

So yeah, you can tell that the game was successful as an experiment given that it had plenty of sequels. Its gameplay was already incredibly addictive (which is pretty bad when your hard-earned quarters are on the line), but that's when you can tell that a company has a successful product on their hands. But not every successful experiment stays in arcades; it also released on a couple of home consoles.


Unfortunately, no home consoles at the time could perfectly handle the game as they were. For it to run efficiently, it entailed that four characters had to basically be on the same screen simultaneously in order for them to be switched in and out quickly. The game did receive a perfect home console port for the Sega Saturn, which included a 4MB Ram cartridge to help the system handle the game (for reference: a bunch of other games, including Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, Darkstalkers: Vampire Savior, and The King of Fighters '97 would also only work with the cart plugged in). It was the only perfect home port, which tragically wasn't released outside of Japan. We did get the Playstation version though. Note: place much emphasis on version.


It's a shame that Sony didn't want any added ram on their console, which resulted in a much less-than-adequate port of the game. Gone was the innovative tag team gameplay that made the arcade game so special, and in its place was a...one-on-one fighter - though you could play the game in tag-team mode if two human players wanted to play the same characters, but still. Not only that, but it was also laden with plenty of slowdown and serious framerate issues. The sad part is that, before the time of emulators, this was our only option for a home console version unless you were willing to import (which a lot of people did).

X-Men vs. Street Fighter isn't an X-Men game per se - thus only half-qualifying for this feature - but its significance is important to X-Men in gaming because of how much the game meant to arcades back in the mid-90s and the rest of the crossover games. These days, it's still pretty great to play, so feel free.