There was an age back then when a group of gamers would regularly hang out in gaming arcades. Not the types where you see 3D Virtual Rides, Karaokes, or basketball shooters that reward you with tickets, no. Just ones that are full of gaming cabinets, many of them designed and calibrated to make sure you insert as many quarters or tokens as possible to finish your gaming sessions. They were hard, and you’re not expected to get far on your first try. These games were top-scrolling shoot-em-ups, side-scrolling beat-em-ups, and of course, fighters. The hardest possible opponent one person can have is another human, after all.

A lot of these games were left behind in these arcades as time changed how people enjoyed them. Some made it to consoles that are by today, about 20 or 30 years old. So getting an authentic experience of playing them would be difficult to come by if possible at all. So here comes Capcom offering us a piece of history for a price lower than most triple-A offerings, Capcom Fighting Collection 2. Let’s go over the details.

The Titles

The games being offered are Capcom vs SNK 1 and 2, Plasma Sword, Capcom Fighting Evolution, Rival Schools Project Justice, Street Fighter Alpha 3, and Powerstone 1 and 2. That last one was a bit of a surprise, but a welcome one.

I don’t think it’d be ideal to tell you how all of these games are, since I don’t have a history with all of them. But I’d be willing to tell you all about my personal favorites out of these.

Let’s start with Capcom Vs SNK 2, a game that has a huge roster of characters, which are admittedly a lot of sprites just carried over from other games. But the really interesting part here is how there are 6 groove styles to pick from, allowing you to come up with custom combos or just have a super at the ready when you’re in low health. Combine this with the characters you can mix and match with the ratio system, and you’ve got a lot of possibilities to explore.

Next would be Rival Schools Project Justice, this game is probably the predecessor for tag fighters, even though the tagging mechanics are pretty limited in this game. What really makes me like this game is the sheer amount of passion put into it. Even if by today’s standards, their character designs are quite cliche, you can see how thoroughly they prepared each of them. How they’re voiced, how each of their characters are unique from one another, and how they interact with each other is telling of how much their creators threw behind it. It also has a combo system that lets you pick up most characters easily, so you can try as many as you want to figure out which three characters you really feel comfortable with.

And finally, I’d like to give a shout-out to Powerstone 2. This arcade game is an arena free-for-all where the top 2 survivors take the win. 4 players go around in a 3D arena attempting to collect powerstones to unlock their alternate form giving them a stronger move set and ultimate. There are techniques unique to each character to use, as well as items to mix up what’s happening in combat, and even stage hazards to deal with as well as arcade bosses to fight as you progress through the game. If you squint your eyes, you might see a lot of concepts here that you might see in a game like Super Smash Brothers. Even if you can basically clear Powerstone 2 in about 30 minutes, the sheer amount of content of characters to try and the chaos that a 4-player free-for-all can make does keep things interesting.

How Well Does it Play?

Frame rate, responsiveness of controls, and timing of audio works perfectly, which is something to be happy about for sure. But there are some issues to contend with with the display.

Your typical display is now at least a 1080p resolution, where many of the titles here are probably 480p. So the pixels will indeed look blocky once you’re putting it on larger screens with higher resolutions. Their solution here would be applying the visual filters of the ye olde Cathode Ray Tubes TVs (CRTs) to soften the edges around your square pixels. This makes it so that you see the game in the way the developers back then had intended. There are several types of filters to choose from, so you’ll get to pick and choose which one gives you the best nostalgia, or well, viewing experience if you’re not that old yet.

Pressing buttons or doing special moves is surprisingly harder than I expected. I constantly run into the problem of doing another move instead of the super I intended to. So either the input reading is just that strict or I’ve always been this bad at these games, I’m honestly willing to believe either. To be fair, most of these games were designed with an arcade stick, so perhaps using a controller isn’t going to make a good translation of the movement you’re supposed to do. But if you don’t want to stress with the friction this can make, you can make use of the additional control scheme that this Capcom Fighting Collection 2 makes, where specials can be bound to one button and a directional button. Very similarly works like how it does in Granblue Fantasy Versus.

The online functionality of every game appears to be available, and I’d like to speak more about it but I never managed to match with anyone during the review period because no one wanted to take on my Iori, Asamiya, Terry team in Capcom vs SNK 2. Or at least nobody was matching at the times I attempted to. But given Capcom’s history with Netcode, I’m not really worried.

Extras

If you want to find out how truly unfair the final bosses of the past are in these fighting games, especially the ones that have special requirements to meet, this collection gives you a way to do it without having to go back to square one every time you fail. And that way is simply having a quick-save system that lets you backtrack to it like a save-state. Trust me, this is very useful.

Bosses aren’t the only thing to go after, as this collection also gives you a unique set of challenges to meet within it. This gives you a direction or goal to try out as well as you explore the many titles within this offering.

For 2D fighters, you’ll also have the option of seeing detailed frame data so you can fully understand how a character works, though nothing will refine you like the grind of fighting ranked games one after another, racking up losses as well as wins.

Finally, Capcom Fighting Collection 2 offers its own little gallery showing the many concept arts, and actually a comic book from all of the titles offered. You can also listen in on the music that they have, though obviously I can’t show that to you.

Worth the Pickup?

This is a total of 8 titles (6 if you bundle up sequels together), being offered at 40 USD. So while I doubt playing these titles would be the sort of gaming background that might net you a spot in Evo, the value proposition for basically 5 dollars per game is pretty attractive.

For older gamers like me, this is a time capsule of a title letting you revisit simpler times with the modern conveniences that improve the gaming experience. How much do I value hearing the campy voice-overs from Powerstone 2? How many shoryukens can I pack in Sakura’s A-Groove super? Can I finally beat M. Bison in SF Alpha 3? It’s something I’d like to come back to once in a while, at least.

For those who aren’t quite from that age, I’d say that this could be a little museum for you to have so you can see the history behind fighters and how many of these ideas were eventually brought and transformed into the games we see today. Also, if you can beat me in these older games, you can finally stop me from claiming that you won because they make the games too easy these days.

Anyway, that’s Capcom Fighting Collection 2. Something I recommend if you want to visit some fighting game history.

Available on PS4/5, PC, XBOX One/X/S, and Nintendo Switch