Demo Impressions: Marvel vs. Capcom 2

As early as last week, nobody would have believed that tonight, we would have our hands on a playable demo of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 on the HD consoles.  Capcom did mange to keep that little factoid a secret though, and it’s available now!  Currently available exclusively on the Playstation Store, the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 demo weighs in at just under 200 MB.  After taking the 5 minutes to download and install it, I sat down with the demo to take stock of what’s new, what’s changed, and what’s stayed the same with this downloadable version of the fighting game crossover classic.

Splitting the wealh evenly between the Marvel and Capcom sides, the demo of MvC2 allows you to choose from 6 playable characters: Ryu, Chun-Li, Strider Hiryu, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Iron Man.  By giving such a large selection of characters, it ensures that any player trying the demo out should have at least one character that they like – unless they’re one of those crazies who only uses the Sentinel/Storm/Magneto team, that is.  However, all is not well in the land of the crossover fighting game kings.

While Capcom should certainly be commended for even bothering to release a demo so early before the game’s (rumored) June release date, the MvC2 demo isn’t exactly very full-featured.  It allows two human players to go at it on the same system in 3-on-3 versus matches – and that’s it.  There’s no single player mode, no training mode, no vs. CPU mode, and (understandably) no online mode.  What this means is that to play the demo at all, you’ll need a PS3 and two controllers.  I can understand the lack of online play; releasing a demo of a fighter like this with full online capabilities would effectively hamstring its potential sales.  However, releasing a demo that only allows for local multiplayer, with no single-player features whatsoever, seems slightly short-sighted, especially considering the fact that not everyone always has friends around who want to play a fighting game, let alone two controllers.  Not exactly a wise choice considering the percentage of fighting game players who do most of their multiplayer online these days.

Now, that’s not to say the demo is completely pointless; for one, it gives players a good glimpse of how the game is going to run when the final version comes out – and 360 owners, you can breathe a sigh of relief, it’s a good port.  Even when a three-person Hyper Combo is pulled off, the game shows no signs of chugging; porting from the original Dreamcast/Naomi version seems to have produced an arcade-perfect port.  Graphically, the game also looks quite good; the backgrounds and interface look perfect in HD, while the character sprites look about as good as upscaled Dreamcast-era sprites are going to look.  The Smooth graphical filter does help with the aliasing issues, though, making the game look quite good on all fronts.  The only sticking point on the demo’s sterling presentation is the fact that while the visuals were adjusted for modern widescreen televisions, the gameplay was not; the battlefield is still presented as a square, with invisible walls blocking off the far left and right.  It’s a rather unusual sight to see Strider Hiryu leap backwards and cling to a wall, only to be hanging from empty space.  However, all things considered, it’s a minor quibble at best, and the original game’s gameplay is left perfectly intact.

All in all, the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 demo should be considered a sign of good things to come more than anything else; it’s good to hop back into the game and fight like it’s 2000 all over again, even if you can only do it against a buddy in your own living room for now.  Thankfully, you can use custom soundtracks to ensure you’ll never hear “I Wanna Take You For a Ride” ever again.