X-Men vs. Street Fighter (PS1) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Capcom's 1998 versus-fighting game for the Sony PlayStation, X-Men vs. Street Fighter.

Played through on the four-star difficulty level with Sabretooth as the primary fighter and Juggernaut as the supporting attack character.

I played this back when it first came out on the PlayStation, and at the time I loved it. Not being familiar with the arcade or the Saturn versions, I didn't see anything wrong with it. It was fast-moving, it was colorful, and it felt like Street Fighter. What more could you ask for?

Well, in the years following, I came to understand why this port was panned so badly. It's a hideous butchering of the arcade game, but if you take it on its own and can avoid comparing it to the Saturn port or the arcade original, it's a just another cartoony, bombastic, classically-styled Capcom fighter. It's quite good when you look it at it through that lens.

However, those other versions are widely available and easy to find and play these days. And when you play them and then come back to this one, you suddenly realize all of the compromises that were made in bringing this to the PS1. The limited RAM in the PlayStation and it's limited sprite-processing abilities resulted in, like so many late 90s Capcom 2D fighters ported from the CPS2 arcade hardware, the cutting of important gameplay features and a good deal of the animation. It also had some pretty brutal load times.

The tag-team feature is completely gone - your secondary character's role is now limited to a single assist move that brings him or her on-screen for a couple of seconds, whereas in the other versions you can swap between the characters on the fly. The character animations, especially on the larger character sprites, has been hit pretty badly - many of the characters now have about half of their original frames of animation. And even with these compromises, the game still slows to a crawl when too many things are flying across the screen at once!

Still, like I said, if you don't compare it to the other versions, this still plays like a good old 2D Capcom fighter, and is still quite enjoyable as it is. If you insist on an arcade-accurate experience, though, you'd do better to pass on this. The Sega Saturn port is the only one that managed to do justice to the coin-op original.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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