BADCP - GPOW Tribute

The Outrage Mob

DATE:
25 YEARS AGO

GPOW 25TH
A N N I V E R S A R Y



PLAYSTATION 4	BAD	MARVEL VS CAPCOM INFINITE


			Take a look at the characters in MVSCI, the veteran characters, especially. No, really, take a long, thoughtful look at them and see the painstaking detail that went into making the characters in this game. The debate over whether they look as impressive as their 2-D counterparts will never end, but they still look impressive, nonetheless. When I look at characters like Strider, Spiderman, Hulk, Ryu, Chun-Li, and Morrigan, I am always impressed by how faithful they are to their early 2-D versions. Even in their new, evolved costumes, I am consistently amazed at how close they are to their old costume versions. Simpletons have assumed that Capcom was in complete control of the character roster (with no intervention from Marvel themselves), and is completely at fault for how the roster turned out. You see, it's not as simple as the simpletons who criticize it make it sound.

Capcom had the incredibly-difficult job of making the character designs live up to the Japanese quality established in previous games, while adhering to Marvel's expectations of how the characters look in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Again, this seems like an incredibly-difficult task in which many characters likely went through an extensive amount of trial and error before the final product. Despite the unnatural amount of criticism, MVSCI is still Japanese, yet American. Hitting that medium has never been easy for Capcom, but since the start of the VS series, they've always been able to make the American characters look Japanese, and the Japanese characters look American, all into one cohesive package. It's all about making compromises from both sides, and as few as possible to make that package cohesive. MVSCI still continues this long-running tradition, even if critics think that the compromise was too much on Capcom's side. Powered by the versatile Unreal Engine 4, the animation and effects in Marvel VS Capcom Infinite are as smooth and splashy as ever. The common misconception is that because it's not 2-D pixel art, it is cheap 3-D-rendered models by default. This is untrue. Though the game obviously has some darker overtones from its virtue-signaling Marvel movie source content, it also looks soft and vibrant at the same time. This dichotomy is on full display when we look closely at the characters and see how detailed they are, but how fluid their animation is. I'm not a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe costume changes, but this is where Marvel characters are now, and the way Capcom made them in Marvel VS Capcom Infinite is the way they should look. For all intents and purposes, Capcom did their best in keeping their animation and design standards in application to the difficult place Marvel's characters have arrived at. Marvel characters like Thanos may look different in their Marvel Cinematic Universe forms in Marvel VS Capcom Infinite, but they play similar and even have moves from those older Capcom fighting games like Marvel Super Heroes.

	21
	PLEASE
	Take a key for coming in!

	22
	NEW LOOKS
	Old teams.

	23
	CINEMATIC
	Camera angles.

	24
	EVERY MOOD
	Captured in Capcom's signature brand of animation.

	25
	METALLIC
	Threats larger than Mad Gear thugs.

MVSCI's fighting locales have been criticized for being "boring", and they aren't exactly crowded with life, but neither are the ones in MVSC2, which were criticized for that very reason. Not to say they weren't good-looking (because they still are even today), but MVSC2's were populated by machines and little else. Some of MVSCI's stages are similar, but some are populated with a variety of characters from Marvel's flailing M.O.D.O.K. to rioting Final Fight thugs J. and Two P. GPOW fans would have noticed the small details that Capcom devoted time to putting in each stage; riot police and vehicles advance toward a toppled Haggar statue, Resident Evil test subjects float in glass tubes, helicopters weave between buildings, and robots battle in a storm of laser fire. Despite this, there are more double-standards here which ignore MVSC2's unpopulated fighting locales while magnifying MVSCI's.

	26
	CRUSHING
	Straight.

This is unfortunate, considering the amount of work that Capcom put into fusing two completely different universes from two completely different real-life cultures. Populated or not, every nook and cranny of MVSCI's fighting locales is packed with clever tributes to the legacies of both Marvel and Capcom. So clever, in fact, that they seem absolutely genius, and tributes like A.I.M.Brella couldn't have turned out any better. Every time I play the game and see the tributes throughout, I can't help but to think of what an incredible job Capcom did with the seemingly-impossible task of merging the deeply-rooted legacies of Capcom and Marvel into one. It feels to me like critics went into MVSCI just waiting for petty opportunities to bash the successful merging of two monster IPs simply because they themselves lack the capacity to attain such success.

	27
	MEGA MAN
	X evades Hulk in the Mission Mode.

	28
	ACTION
	Adventure dream match.

	29
	NEMESIS
	Tentacles.

	30
	DYSTOPIAN
	Heroes, or anti-heroes?

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