was VERY reluctant to buy marvel vs Capcom 3 when it was on sale because of the slop machines that are aaaaaaa devs.
said screw it and pulled the pin. Sat on it for about a week and finally booted it up last night… I absolutely forgot that these AAAA devs used to make games, not stores with games attached.
very refreshing to be bought back to the ¢25 arcade machine games again with no stupid stores, cosmetics, characters locked behind a wallet.
Now if I can just find a street fighter game that is in the same vein that doesn’t have stores with stores and nonstop ads for junk.
I remember Marvel vs Capcom 3 being advertised on Newgrounds yeaaaars ago. By Egoraptor and a bunch of other artists if I remember correctly. The animations should still be there.
I know the hivemind around here has some pretty strong opinions about Nintendo, but I do appreciate that their games still feel normal when nearly every other AAA has pretty thoroughly enshittified.
Nintendo gets sooo much hate online but I genuinely think they make some of the most solid video games. They innovate, they iterate, they ship rock solid games. Now if only their online wasn’t absolute garbage.
Their games are notably expensive, and they are overly defensive about their IPs, but they haven’t forgotten that the goal is to make fun games first and foremost.
It’s because their employees don’t leave until retirement. It’s how they can pass on knowledge and experience to the next generation of developers. It’s how the old guard like Shigeru Miyamoto can keep the companies creative direction pointing the right way. This is why they have delivered high quality creative work for decades while others, especially western studios , just die a slow death by a thousands cuts because they fire employees constantly for short term profits. Nintendo trains and nurtures talent and actually keep them on the payroll so the company can benefit from the time they have invested in the employees. Nintendo in Japan is a highly regarded employer with a very good reputation.
AAA makes great games all the time …
Quite often I feel like the internet is over-critical of AAA. Yes, on many occasions they put out manufactured slop, and it’s important to consider reviews from multiple sources for that reason.
Even Ubisoft games, when you ignore their little MTX menu, have some flashes of writing brilliance or interesting historical attention to detail. Other times, people manufacture their own forms of annoyance, like “Visiting every single icon on the map is boring!!” Yeah, no shit, that’s why they desperately try to stop you from doing that. FC5 even sleep-darts you to forcefully pull you into story missions, though that idea was derided.
If you’re looking for other Capcom fighting games that won’t bug you about buying addons, the Marvel vs. Capcom Collection has Marvel vs Capcom 2, as well as the older MvC games. And Capcom Fighting Collection 2 has Capcom vs. SNK 2.
The Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection has SF3, although I think people were disappointed with that one and I forget why.
But yeah, I get what you’re saying. I dug up my Dreamcast recently, and it’s so refreshing how every game is just… the entire game. Like, the whole thing is there, on the disc. If you have it, you have all of it.
If you haven’t played a AAA game in over 14 years, then you might be surprised to find out that it happens all the time. Marvel 3 did upset its fans with its business model though. They put out “Ultimate” Marvel vs. Capcom 3 a year later, for like $40, and it pissed a lot of people off. So the cash shop wasn’t in the game, but it still had that sour taste for a lot of folks. The reality is that making a fighting game is not going to result in the best version of that game on the first try, meaning that they need to do more work on it after the point of sale, meaning they need to raise more money to justify that work. It used to be buying separate versions of the same game (Super, Turbo, Championship Edition, etc.), and now it’s buying DLC characters in the same version of the game. That $0.25 arcade machine had a high chance of being far more expensive than what you paid for the home version, and that’s why they did it; arcades were a plenty nefarious business model in their own right.
