The Official Thread of Capcom

[Barry the Nomad]

I think any SEGA fan has some sort of liking towards Capcom. During the Dreamcast days they released a LOAD of fantastic titles. And the Saturn and Genesis had some really great titles as well. Like SEGA, Capcom has great games in a number of genres, but they do so in their own unique style.

When did you first encounter Capcom?

What is your favorite Capcom game?

What do you love and hate about the company?

How would you describe the "Capcom" style?

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I'd say I first became aware of the company in the early '90's. Like SEGA, they have a very distinct logo. I remember thinking of Capcom as the company that made all these really cool looking games that I couldn't play, since I was a SEGA console owner. Of course, there ARE Capcom games for the Genesis, but I was looking at Capcom's disney titles. The first game I probably played was Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers  for the NES, at a friend's house. I'm also certain I played Street Fighter at arcades.

The Dreamcast era was when I really got into the company. Power Stone, Power Stone 2, MvC2, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Rival Schools 2, CvSNK and Tech Romancer are some of my favorite titles. Power Stone 1&2 are probably my favorite Capcom games.

Since the Dreamcast era, I haven't played as many Capcom games. MvC3 is fun, though I've yet to buy it myself. I'm a latecomer to Phoenix Wright, I've only played the first one, and I loved it. I've started playing Zack and Wiki and it's great fun, reminds me of old point and click PC games.

As for the Capcom style? It's hard to pin down. Like SEGA, they have a strong arcade influence to their games. I associate over the top human characters and a wide range of colors to their games. Characters are often over the top and highly animated. I also associate their unique art style with their games. It's interesting how they offer up games with bright and cheery visuals, but they also have games like Dino Crisis and Resident Evil which are very dark and scary. Still, "craziness" exists in both styles of game.

What do I hate about them? Probably how they're handling Mega Man nowadays. I'm not a Mega Man fan, but as a Sonic fan I totally get how Mega Man fans are feeling. I'd imagine it's like if Colors and Generations never existed and all we got was Sonic 4 and a Sonic cameo in Yakuza, but no actual big budget game. I also don't like how Capcom handles digital titles. There are a load of old games that deserve rereleases, but Capcom doesn't seem to care about XBLA and PSN games as much as SEGA does.

Finally, we need a SEGA vs. Capcom game. Really hoping this 3DS game with Bandai is something interesting.

[SOUP]

I love Capcom games :D.  As far as devolopers go, the percentage of games in my collection that are made by Capcom is only beaten by SEGA and Nintendo.

Growing up, I mostly knew Capcom as the developer of the Disney games on NES.  I don't think that I actually played a Capcom game until Mega Man X. Even then it was on an early SNES emulator that didn't even have sound.   That said, I was pretty much hooked right there. The mid-late 90's were a big period of videogame discovery for me at the time.   I made sure to track down the older Mega Man titles on there right away.

At the time, I was the proud owner of a Nintendo 64, so I was pretty much out of luck as far as Capcom titles go.  It wasn't really until the 128-bit era that I really got into their games.
The local movie theater had a Marvel vs. Capcom 3 machine that I enjoyed quite a bit, so I made sure to make it one of my first Dreamcast purchases. After that, I was pretty much hooked. Street Fighter III, Vampire Chronicle, Power Stone, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Cannon Spike, etc.... So many great games for the system.  On the Gamecube side of things, there was the Resident Evil franchise, Viewtiful Joe, and the Mega Man Collections.

Ever since then, I've been playing catch up with their PSOne and PS2 titles.
As far as favourites, It'd have to be a three way tie between Mega Man X, Resident Evil 4, and the 3rd Ace Attorney Game.  Special mentions to Okami and Mega Man Legends :D.

I love the instantely memorable characters and gameplay. Again, I can't think of any other companies besides SEGA and Nintendo that have so many diverse AAA franchises under their belts.

I hate that they've basically lost all of their main talent over the past few years.  That, and they haven't annoucned a localization for Ace Attorney Investigations 2 . Thankfully there's still Platinum Games to carry the torch.

[Chaosmaster8753]

Here's a preview of Dragon's Dogma, from I guess the remaining staff behind the Resident Evil and Devil May Cry series:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrCiV4LOYk4[/youtube]

I might write something about my experience with Capcom later.

[MadeManG74]

Been meaning to reply to this thread.

I never really considered Capcom a big favourite company of mine, but always respected them. Now that I think about it though, they make a lot of the games I really like, Marvel vs series, Street Fighter, Resident Evil & Dead Rising in particular recently.

Having said that, they've really put me on a downer with Street Fighter X Tekken, which I think is a terrible game overall, let alone a bad fighter. The gems are the worst offender, poorly implemented, terribly unbalanced and they introduce a cardinal sin for fighting games - Pay to Win DLC. There are DLC and Pre-order gems that are just flat-out better than the free ones, in a game all about competitive balance, that's just disgusting. In terms of the actual game though, I feel it's a mess. They tried to shoe-horn in so many damn features without thinking them through properly. You have Tag mechanics, Super moves, EX Moves, Team Supers, Chargable Supers, auto-chains and Pandora Mode (which is just retarded). Theres just so, so much stuff thrown in that really doesn't (IMO) add much to it. I also just hate the gameplay on a personal level and don't enjoy it nearly as much as their other recent efforts (Marvel 3 series and SF4 series).

To Barrington

I also don't like how Capcom handles digital titles. There are a load of old games that deserve rereleases, but Capcom doesn't seem to care about XBLA and PSN games as much as SEGA does.

I disagree. While they don't have the quantity of games on XBLA and PSN, their quality makes up for it. When Capcom re-releases a game on XBLA they do it RIGHT. SSF2THDR (I love that acronym) was a brilliant release. It was essentially a sequel to SSF2T, and contained the new graphics, new balance changes and some of the best online netcode to this date. And if you were a purist who didn't want the changes, you could play it in 'Classic mode' which is to my understanding, identical to Super Turbo (apart from the graphics).

Street Fighter 3 Third Strike Online Edition was set to be the best XBLA fighting game ever made, they seemed to address EVERYTHING a fighter fan could ever, ever want. The game had lobbies, tournament mode, button config on the select screen, GGPO netcode, youtube replay sharing... the list goes on. You could even fiddle with the graphics to the extent that you could add scan lines to make it look like a CRT arcade screen! Unfortunately (and this is a huge 'unfortunately') the matchmaking was hot garbage. People could nearly never find a decent match and even with the great GGPO netcode, there was all sorts of trouble playing online. Ironic that an Online Edition was let down by it's online shortcoming.

Finally, the Dead Rising XBLA games have been awesome, Case Zero was really cool (loved that it was only 400 points and that it carried over to the main game) and Case West, while easily the worst game in the series, was just about a full entry into the franchise and featured Frank West and Chuck Greene teaming up for the first time.

They haven't had much in the way of original games recently that I can write home about, but I don't blame them in this climate (Sega is doing the same thing now anyway).

As for the actual questions:

When did you first encounter Capcom?
Street Fighter 2. I was so garbage at this game when I was under 10, but I still loved the living shit out of it and wanted to play it all the time. If not this, then The Punisher, which is still one of my favourite scrolling beat-em-ups ever. This game made me the massive Punisher fan that I am today. Awesome game.

What is your favorite Capcom game?
Very, very hard to choose. I would put Punisher up there in all honesty, if only for the pure nostalgia value. At the moment I could also say Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, which I really love and have a lot of fun with as a fighting game.

Then again, God Hand is pure awesome too... too hard to call!

What do you love and hate about the company?
Love many of their games, hate their recent DLC plans.

How would you describe the "Capcom" style?
Don't really believe in a 'Capcom' style, but rathe there are styles for their various franchises.

[max_cady]

I loved Capcom's games during the Saturn/Dreamcast/PS2 era. Like many of you I've started out with Street Fighter II on the Genesis. But Megaman X3 on the Saturn was the one that got me really excited.
I agree that their logo is simply one of the best around. Marvel vs Capcom 2 being one of the most beloved franchises on the Dreamcast was one of my fondest memories.

***Incomind rant***

But with the good, comes the bad... It's strange that Capcom seems to be enjoying a huge sucess this generation while incidentally I feel that their games are becoming worse, not "unplayable" level bad, but potentially bad business decisions that could've otherwise sank other companies.

When I bought the Xbox 360 in late 2006, I remember playing a demo of Dead Rising and the first thing I thought was "Something's not right here...". My suspicions where only confirmed when I bought Lost Planet. It was meant to be a great launch game on the 360, but it's just not... Terribly generic and uninteresting, to say the least, but it's already getting a third title, nobody knows why...

You know how a lot of people are only now saying that Capcom is losing it, I predicted it. I played Lost Planet way back in 2007 and knew that Capcom was going to screw people over in some way, shape or form. Earned me a couple of verbal assaults back then, but who's laughing now...

I got Street Fighter IV for dirt cheap a while back, but I just couldn't handle it. There's nothing wrong with the design per say, but it still continues to do the same tricks over and over, since SF II:
-Super cheap end boss; - Check!
-Story endings that still make no sense; - Check!
-Barely any game modes; - Check!*

*Not really, but we will squeeze them in in the next update.

Not to mention terrible games such as Dark Void, Bionic Commando that have faded into obscurity.

The only franchise that I still have some connection with is Resident Evil, because not even Marvel vs Capcom can do that.

Capcom has milked their survival horror series as much as possible, but it's still a strong brand.

[SOUP]

Glad I'm not the only one that found Seth to be really cheap. I'm no expert Street Fighter player, but I didn't manage to beat him (on Medium) until I picked up Stuper Street Fighter IV for $5 two weeks ago.

At least you don't have to beat him twice like Gill from SFIII. That was a nasty surprise .

They had a lot of good games on the DS this past generation (Ghost Trick, Ace Attorney, Okamiden, Mega Man ZX...), but I agree that their console offerings have been a bit hit or miss. The fact that they've lost so many of their big name developers is pretty troubling .

[MadeManG74]

You have to remember that single player modes for fighting games are generally a low priority compared to the competitive side of it. This doesn't count for all fighters, and some can do both really well, but.. yeah I don't think it's fair to bash SF for it's single player component. I might as well say that Fallout is a bad series because it doesn't have online multiplayer - it's simply not the focus of the game.

With regards to their other series, I actually really like Dead Rising (only game I didn't enjoy that much was Case West, but that was just because of the boring location it was set in), and I loved MvC3 and UMvC3 this gen too.

Like you, I still like Resi and can't wait for Resi 6, although I do feel that Resi 5 was a bit of a mis-step for the series. It wasn't a bad game in my eyes, just not as good as the others, and not very Resident Evil feeling.

[max_cady]

Since I didn't play RE 4 when it came out, I didn't quite get why there was so much backlash towards RE 5, which despite it all, is still one of my favorite game this generation.

Now that I played both of 'em, I get it. Resident Evil 4 took the series into a completely different direction. More action oriented, "smart" monsters and Michael Bay-isms.
RE 5 was still very good, but it was underwhelming in the sense that it was Resident Evil 4, or rather an abridged version. And last minute cover mechanics did not help the game one bit.

[SOUP]

I'm going to pick up Resident Evil Revelations on the 3DS soon, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it stacks up beside 4 and 5. The demo I played was pretty impressive, and reminded me a lot of the slower paced DLC episodes from RE5.

[max_cady]

I hate Capcom's guts right now, but I gotta give him credit... Resident Evil 6 looks really good! I saw the full 20 minute demo on Machinima.com and it looked great.