Capcom Fighting Collection 1 + 2 Bundle

Power Stone 2 playable online with rollback netcode is the single best reason this bundle exists, and I say that as someone who plays fighting games enthusiastically and badly. That one inclusion drags a Dreamcast-era four-player arena brawler out of collector-tax purgatory and hands it to anyone with a controller and a friend on the internet. The rest of the package is eighteen arcade titles split across two collections, and the honest math is that perhaps half of them will hold your attention past the first evening. The good news is that the half which lands is a genuinely strange, generous half, running from Vampire Savior's chain combos to a puzzle game that is secretly a high-level competitive fighter. The first collection is the weird one. Five Darkstalkers entries anchor it, which sounds like padding until you remember Vampire Savior is one of the best-feeling 2D fighters Capcom ever shipped, all chain combos, air dashes and monster animations nobody has topped for sheer personality. Around it sit Red Earth, which had never received a proper home release before and plays like an arcade boss rush with light RPG leveling stapled on, Cyberbots and its buildable mechs, Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, and Hyper Street Fighter II with its pick-your-era versions of every World Warrior. The second collection is the crowd-pleaser: Capcom vs. SNK and its much better sequel with the six Grooves, Project Justice and its team-up supers, both Power Stone games, Plasma Sword, Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper, and Capcom Fighting Evolution. Everything runs through the same front end, and the front end is good. Rollback netcode across the board, online lobbies, casual and ranked queues, training mode with input display on the titles that support it, save states, a one-button special move option for anyone who never learned to charge back-forward, and a gallery stuffed with concept art and full soundtracks. Display filters cover scanline purists and clean-pixel people alike, and regional arcade revisions are preserved where they differ, which matters more than it sounds if you care about balance quirks. Sitting down with a stick and drilling Vampire Savior routes with frame data on screen is something the original cabinets never offered, and it is the difference between a nostalgia purchase and something that stays installed. The disappointments are structural rather than technical. Vampire Hunter 2 and Vampire Savior 2 are near-identical roster shuffles of Vampire Savior, so the eighteen-game count is softer than the box math suggests. Capcom Fighting Evolution is the runt of the litter and always has been, a crossover with mismatched sprite work and a tag system that never gelled. Licensing means no Marvel crossovers and no Street Fighter III, the two absences most people will actually feel. Online populations skew hard toward Capcom vs. SNK 2 and Street Fighter Alpha 3, so if your heart is set on Cyberbots or Plasma Sword matches, bring your own opponent. Power Stone tells the same story: total magic with three friends, quiet without them. So who is this for? Anyone who wants the arcade-era Capcom back catalogue preserved properly and playable against strangers, and anyone curious about the branch of fighting game design that got quietly abandoned once everything standardised around modern Street Fighter. If you only want one competitive fighter to grind for the next year, buy that fighter instead, because this is a library rather than a career. If you want something you can dip into for a month, find the two or three that click, and keep around for years, it is one of the better preservation jobs anyone has put out. I keep going back to Power Stone 2 and Red Earth, which is not the pairing I expected when I started.

Alex · Scout Team

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