Capcom Fighting Jam

http://www.dental.gr.jp/web/shq/game/JAM/bris.htm

It started simply enough with X-Men vs. Street Fighter. Capcom merged two franchises to create a crossover fighting game featuring characters from its Street Fighter and X-Men games. Some called it a rip on SNK's King of Fighters games (which also merged fighting franchises), but for Capcom it was a unique idea that is today remembered fondly by many. Fast forward eight years and fighting game crossovers are everywhere. From three X-Men vs. Street Fighter sequels to Capcom vs. SNK to SNK vs. Capcom to the (supposedly) forthcoming Sammy vs. Capcom, it's no longer much of an original idea to put two franchises up against each other. We're not convinced it's a bad idea, though, so we checked in with the game's Producer, Yoshi Ono, to find out more about how Capcom's latest crossover came together, and then we went hands-on with the game to see how well this new concoction works.

The Backstory

One thing that's important to remember is that even though Capcom popularized the "vs." crossover concept, the company has not produced an original 2D fighter since 2001's Capcom vs. SNK 2. "In the past couple of years, Sammy and some other companies have come up with some new 2D fighting games, and a lot of our fans through various methods -- web sites, comment cards, etc. -- have said 'come on Capcom, it's been a long time,'" says Ono. "'Give us something new. We want a new game. We don't want it to be 3D. We want it to be a traditional 2D fighting game.'"

During that downtime, Capcom put many of its resources into a 3D arcade fighter Capcom Fighting All-Stars, a game the company cancelled in 2003 after an appearance at the AOU trade show in Japan the year before. Player opinions of the early version were not favorable. "For Street Fighter, a lot of people who played it in 2D really liked it, but there's been this 3D boom where you have to kind of make 3D games in order to sell," says Ono. "So we figured there [weren't anymore] gamers out there that want to play 2D games. Then we did a check -- a survey -- and found out surprisingly a lot of people still really like 2D games, and the fact that almost everything was becoming 3D was frustrating to these people."

Thus Capcom decided to return to the 2D arena with Capcom Fighting Evolution -- a game with quite a few similarities to All-Stars...but in 2D. Evolution's character roster features familiar faces such as Ryu, Chun-Li, and Alex, and the new girl Ingrid was originally set to debut in All-Stars. All-Stars carried over other characters from Capcom's 3D fighter family such as Akira from Rival Schools; Evolution digs from the 2D pool of games like Warzard/Red Earth and Darkstalkers. Even the idea of a token Final Fight character (Haggar in All-Stars, Guy in Evolution) has been carried over, so it's easy to think of Evolution as the 2D version of All-Stars.

"What we went with for Capcom Fighting Jam was that we wanted to come up with a game that fans of the older games could get into and yet still had some new aspects to it so that maybe a new player might want to pick it up," says Ono. "So that's how you get this blending, this melding, of a lot of different series, because it's got older characters that people know, however they're used in a different framework, which makes this kind of a fresh play experience."

Still, even Capcom admits that not all the elements are fresh, since the versus games have been around for years. "One other reason we decided to go with this game, is that if you try to go with a new game, you risk alienating fans of the series from before," says Ono. "You risk them not making the plunge into a new fighting game -- that's always a possibility. The reason why we wanted to do it this way is because with Capcom vs. SNK, we'd already mixed in lots of different characters, from two different games, in one system. When we thought about it, it was like, 'let's not mix different characters together and leave it at that -- let's mix different systems.'" So instead of giving players choices of tons of characters and tons of play styles like in Capcom vs. SNK 2, Ono and the rest of the team focused on a smaller number of total characters with more polished play styles that work well together.
Balancing these styles was only part of the difficulty in making the game, though. Because of the different hardware and graphical styles used for each of the games merged into Evolution, Capcom had to make adjustments to the characters to make them work well together. "We redrew a lot of [the animation] frames to fit to the Xbox and PS2 graphical specs, [which] made them prettier and more fluid. However, concerning the actual animation of most of the characters, we have not changed that at all. The reason why is we wanted to maintain the original feeling, so that those who had really mastered the game would know that Chun-Li punches by four frames or something like that. If all of a sudden, you're playing as Chun-Li and she has like 20 frames and this super smooth punch, it wouldn't feel like the Chun-Li you're used to playing. So we had to make a lot of sacrifices to keep the frames the same, yet still balance the gameplay, yet redraw the graphics -- it's very complicated. It sounds like from the consumer's perspective, 'Oh, you're just throwing in five old games and you're off.' It's really nothing simple at all. As a matter of fact, it's probably more complicated to do this than to create a game from scratch."

Our Take

While we were able to briefly get our hands-on the arcade version of Evolution at the Tokyo Game Show last month in Japan, now that we've had an extended period of time with the console game, one thing is abundantly clear: Evolution a lot more streamlined than many recent Street Fighter games. Partially due to the smaller character roster, and partially due to a lack of options once you select your character, it's a simple process to jump in and start playing, even for those players who haven't played a Street Fighter game in the past five years, which is great for those players who complain about modern fighting games being too complicated. In addition, Evolution doesn't seem to suffer from the main problem many streamlined fighters do: being too simple. Since each character brings along super move traits from their respective game and the overall game speed is pretty quick, you won't have to worry about matches being too simple.

A potential downside we can see at this point is that the character roster feels a bit limited. Because there are characters from five different games included, the pickings from each game are restricted to four characters each. Fortunately, there are enough staple characters and wacky characters that this shouldn't be a problem, and we've already unlocked at least one extra fighter (Pyron from Darkstalkers), so hopefully there are more to come.


http://zdmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/Capcom_Fighting_Evolution/Capcom_Fighting_Evo_1_quicktime.zip
http://zdmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/Capcom_Fighting_Evolution/Capcom_Fighting_Evo_2_quicktime.zip