X-Men vs. Street Fighter (Saturn) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
125A playthrough of Capcom's 1997 versus-fighting game for the Sega Saturn, X-Men vs. Street Fighter.
Played on the hardest difficulty level with Cammy and Ken.
For whatever advantages the PlayStation may have held when it came to 3D graphics, there's no question that the Saturn absolutely trounced it when it came to 2D. Few games make the distinction as clear as Capcom's CPS2 arcade ports do - and X-Men vs. Street Fighter is an excellent example of this. As the first game to require the 4meg RAM expansion cartridge (which, conveniently enough, came packaged with the game), Capcom nailed a truly arcade-perfect port here.
The loading times of the PlayStation version are completely gone, all of the characters have their animations left completely intact (just look at Magneto and Sabretooth's idle standing animations!), and like in the arcade version, you can swap your characters in and out on the fly without any hiccups whatsoever. Even the attract sequence is completely intact - all of the cutaways to different fights have been left in. Put this and an emulated copy through Mame side-by-side, and you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
X-Men vs. Street Fighter was an excellent game, regardless of the merits of one port over another. It's hyper-flashy and fast, and the lurid use of color is as gorgeous as it is harsh to the eye. The sound track follows suit, with amusingly melodramatic horns and dance-style synths blasting behind some of the most over-exaggerated voice acting you've ever heard. Capcom knew how to get you pumped, and how to get your quarters.
The gameplay continued to refine the classic Capcom 2D formula with it's introduction of tag teams, which allow for (and to some extent require) a fair amount of strategy and planning to get the most effective pairings. The combo system has been tweaked, feeling like a 'roided-up evolution of what was begun in Darkstalkers and Children of the Atom. Variable counters, Aerial Raves (which I used to confused with Dynamite Rave, given my love of DDR back at the time) and assist attacks provide a lot more room for creativity in how to beat your opponent down, and there's little more satisfying than seeing that combo counter reach higher and higher as your enemy helplessly gets flung about the screen in a torrent of neon streaks. Of course, it was better balanced and further refined in later games, but when it came out, X-Men vs. Street Fighter was rightfully the king of the castle when it came to 2D fighters.
My only quibble (and I think quibble is too strong a word, still) with it is that it's just too easy. To be fair, I don't know if it's even a valid complain. I can blitz through the game with no problem on the hardest difficulty level, but I'm not sure if that is because the game is actually easy, or if I've just played it so damn much that it doesn't pose a challenge anymore. I do really appreciate how not-cheap the difficulty is. It's nothing like the controller-reading AI from Super Street Fighter II Turbo, and that's a great thing.
It's too bad that this was only released in Japan, because it's utterly fantastic. But, even on an American Saturn, you can play it just fine. Grab yourself a 4-in-1 Action Replay cart - it will give you the required memory expansion and it will boot import discs. I don't hesitate at all in making that recommendation - it's well worth the investment.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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