Mortal Kombat X

(PS4, Xbone, PC, Netherealm Studios, 2015)

I have been playing Mortal Kombat since year dot (or 23 years in real words) and I have many cherished memories of visiting gory digital violence upon my friends, and even a repressed memory of getting my ass kicked for real in an arcade in '93, due to a disagreement over a Kano vs. Kano mirror match. Serious Business.
But, two decades since then, the franchise has held on against naysayers, political outrage, a mish-mash of both good and terrible titles and even studio closure, to remain one of the most instantly recognisable brands in videogame history. As we head into a new generation of gaming. Netherealm Studios, led by MK creator Ed Boon, have returned with the tenth edition of the uber-violent fighting game franchise, Mortal Kombat X.

Ooooh, that's a bit of a nick

The much-celebrated story mode has returned from MK9, with a lengthy and dramatic tale of revenge, betrayal and fantasy politics that will turn the MK universe on its head. Once again, the player takes control of a different character for each chapter, which also acts as a sort of tutorial for those new to the genre. The cinematics are well shot and feature some excellent motion capture and voice acting (particularly from new insectoid-girl D'Vorah) but I found the narrative itself to be lacking, trite with convenience, and not a patch on the previous games' storyline, particularly in the lethargic final third. It's still a labour of love by the developers however, and far and above anything else that the genre has to offer.

Visually, MKX takes a huge step up from its predecessor, NRS has always been adept at creating wonderful stages, and whilst there aren't as many as one might expect, they are all beautifully designed and animated, featuring a host of denizens and creatures telling their own stories behind the carnage played out by the Kombatants. Sharp lighting and torrid weather effects add to the overall atmosphere, with detailed shadows and light beams giving gorgeous depth to the characters, which smoothly immerses them into the location. The characters themselves, are much improved from the absolutely horrendous models of DC Comics fighter Injustice, but there is still much room for improvement, as the general quality of faces, anatomy proportions, clothing and textures varies amongst the 24 character roster.

The sound and voices are nicely done, with grisly, bone-crunching effects and a variety of sarcastic dialogue barked between the fighters. The music, however, falls short, and consists of directionless industrial metal, flatly churning away in the background, mostly unnoticed, and is instantly forgettable.

 Mileena, standing in for my absent regular Sindel

The Krypt makes a welcome return from previous games. A mode in which the player can earn moves, costumes, concept art, and various goodies via trading in Koins that are earned through all game modes. This time around, The Krypt plays out like a pseudo-Tales of Grimrock, where you traverse through various areas in first-person, hunting for various objects that will allow deeper access into the hideous tombs. The Krypt is jumpscare-tastic, and they happen so often that it becomes tiring quickly. It's definitely a very cool mode, but, realistically, you'll have it over, done with and forgotten about in less than a week (unless you're deathly afraid of spiders, in which case you might never finish it)

All the above is entirely irrelevant compared to the most crucial element of the game, the fighting mechanics. I'm happy to report that MKX has a very solid fighting system. It feels very much like the mechanics of MK9, but with a little more fluidity and “looseness” to its controls. The infamous “dial-a-kombo” system is still in full effect and whilst that may not be considered a good thing for many fighting game fans, it has become standard for the MK series. The game now includes the background interaction system of Injustice, though it feels far less necessary here. Each character now has three “Variations” to choose from, essentially juggling their move-sets and opening up new opportunities or extensions on combos. This allows the player to not only experiment with the characters, but also with individual builds of those characters. It's a great idea, and a huge improvement over the tragic “Styles” systems of the PS2-era MK games. The return of “Brutalities” is very welcome, allowing for matches to end suddenly in trademark gory fashion, without the need for sitting through endless Fatality cinematics, which had, in MK9, encouraged many a salty ragequit.

The sweetest of all victories

Speaking of rage, out in the wild, MKX is a brutal game, and requires practice and patience. Its fast-paced fisticuffs and reliance on extended combos and ugly 50/50 mix-ups may frustrate and even upset many new players. Jumping online can be an infuriating affair for those ill-equipped to deal with shameless spamming or Machiavellian mind-games. But glory awaits those who keep their cool, hone their craft, and practice, practice, practice.

You have to put in the effort to get the reward, no-one simply “deserves to win” because they bought the product. This is your first lesson. You're welcome.

As the first MK game of the new generation, Netherealm Studios have worked hard to release a solid entry for the modern gamer, one that maintains the veteran elements of the now two decades old series, whilst adding, or simply tweaking, various other elements in order to provide a open path for the studio to venture down in inevitable sequels.
Mortal Kombat X is an excellent (X-cellent?) follow-up to the hugely successful 2011 reboot, and whilst further work needs to be done in order to push it into the upper echelon of competitive fighting games, the Mortal Kombat brand is absolutely rock solid and, with MKX, definitely sets the groundwork for something very special in the future.

Phoned In

(PC, PS3, PS4, WiiU, Xbone, Xbox 360, Ubisoft, 2014)
When first unveiled at E3 2012, Ubisoft’s Watch_Dogs was speedily declared the game of the new generation by rabid fans, who continued to stoke the hype train's engine to full throttle, through its delay, until its eventual release in 2014.
By this point, the intriguing looking sandbox adventure had, through word of frothing mouths, been spun into this magical game that could build you a mansion, help you achieve immortality and, less realistically, kill your buyer's remorse over having purchased a next-gen console in launch year.

Set in a bleak near-future Chicago, Dogs sees the player step into the trenchcoat of nihilistic hax0r Aiden Pearce, a supposed "vigilante" who likes to jack cars, run down pedestrians and steal from civilians. After a botched heist leads to vehicular tragedy, Pearce' sets his narrowing eyes and iconic baseball cap on a mission of personal vengeance, aided by his sociopathic partner Jordi Chin and a poundshop version of Lisbeth Salander.

The Girl With The Dreadful Tattoo

WD’s gimmick, heavily showcased in promotional materials, is Aiden’s ability to access Chi-town’s entire technological infrastructure via his smartphone. This neckbeard super-power gives Pearce options to manipulate computer servers, bridges, traffic lights and everything in-between. (Though sadly there is no option to download Pearce a likeable personality.)

Tucked away behind this unique and admittedly interesting curtain is the actuality of what Watch_Dogs really is, a standard GTA clone which utilises QTEs to turn the floaty driving sequences and cover-based shoot-outs in Pearce’ favour, raising road blockades to dodge high-speed pursuers for example, or hitting the lights to turn a frantic gun battle into a flailing game of blind man’s death.

Not pictured: an abundance of generic shooting

Whilst these abilities provide a momentarily interesting new take on the typical sandbox world of the crime-sim, they are, in reality, quite basic and redundant, requiring little more than a well-timed button press to almost completely free Pearce from whatever danger he is currently facing.
Once this realisation dawns and the mask is stripped away, Dogs becomes little more than just another "Watch the cutscene, Drive to the icon, Shoot the guys and Repeat" gaming experience, littered with shallow Easter egg hunts and plotless sidequests.

Watch_Dogs' fills its visually attractive city with an over-abundance of things to do, a common problem in modern sandbox games, where developers cannot grasp that just having "tons of shit going on" does not equal a fun gaming experience. In fact, it makes a game flabby and directionless, taking the attention away from any narrative urgency and filling the HUD with an explosion of pointless thumbnails.
There is nothing wrong with adding sidequests to support a story, or to reward you with additional characters or items, but just saying "Collect these 100 arbitrary items" or "visit all these locations" isn't adding longevity, it's just needlessly distracting filler.

Less really is more.

"But first, lemme take a #Selfie"

It would remiss of me to point out that, despite this personally negative review, Watch_Dogs is an acceptable game, it is action packed, visually attractive and its phone-related chicanery is a clever and unique concept. Praise should also be given to the voice acting from the entire cast (bar Pearce himself, who, you guessed it, has that whole "Metal Geeyeear" thing going on.)
But, behind the hype and bravado, it offers nothing at a base level that we haven't seen in a hundred other games since the early 2000's, and a tired sense of deja-vu sets in after only a couple of hours play. Add to this the recent controversies over the abhorrent uPlay system, the suspiciously crippled PC version and the FIVE different collectors editions, and the negatives heavily outweigh the positives.

What could have been..

Watch_Dogs could never have lived up to the rabid hype pouring from its starry-eyed followers and Ubisoft themselves, who are the very epitome of hyperbole. As a general B-list product it is fine, but as a supposed spear-tip of a new generation of gaming, it's no more than the Emperor's new clothes.

Anyone tired of crime-sims may want to drop this particular call.

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

(DOS/Commodore CDTV, Delta 4 Interactive, 1993)
Interactive Movies.
That should run a chill down the spine of any gamer in their mid-thirties.

The dawn of CD based gaming was instantly seen as a way to supplement real video footage in place of doing any actual work designing graphics, characters, backgrounds and such. The early 90's was drowned in such entertainment (questionable word choice) on fledging new CD consoles such as the 3DO, CDi and Sega Mega-Cd.
All terrible machines. Fact.

£15 for the lot, You pay me.

In 1993, I would have been about thirteen years old, and I was more than interested in the concept of "Real Video" games, already being a disciple of Don Bluth's laserdisc trilogy and the American Laser Games shooters, of which I'm an unashamed fan.
I remember reading short, forgotten reviews about an interactive movie that appeared around this time on the PC and the first ever CD based console, the Commodore Amiga CD-TV

Ever used one of these? Liar.

The game was called "Psycho Killer" which tied it in with another interest of mine, as I was obsessed with Slasher movies as a young 'un.
A scary pair of eyes stare out from behind the game's title logo, sinister stuff indeed.

You know it's a real game because it's ADULT

The game never got large reviews, or much coverage in general by the gaming press, as it was a small scale release, and for such an obscure format to boot. But I often wondered about it, as this game sounded right up my particularly dark alley.
Fast forward twenty years later and, whilst browsing a site for DOS abandonware, my eyes set upon a title, a title that literally unlocks a memory long since buried under stacks of old gaming magazines and episodes of Knightmare in my brain.
Psycho Killer is here..
and I can finally play it..
and Fuck Me is it rubbish.

If this picture excites you, you're gonna LOVE Psycho Killer

My first realisation is that it's a British game, a very British game, and more than likely a bedroom developed one at that. My second realisation is instead of being Full Motion Video, it's more camcorder footage, converted to photographs, then slide-showed next to one another which gives a bizarre stop-motion look.
Also, on the PC release, all the colour has been compressed out, giving everything a fugly, one tone palette.

The narrative is as simple as this: Three people, A geeky protagonist, the anorak-sporting PSYCHO KILLER and some girl as a damsel in distress, chase each other around a muddy field in an area we Brits refer to as "The Home Counties" that is to say, very sparse farmland moors, completely lacking in life, animals and interest.

Gameplay consists of moving through a series of locations/photographs, choosing whether to go one way or the other. Every so often, our completely unbelievable Psycho Killer will attack, and you have to click on something on the screen to avoid death, such as his weapon or his bored looking oik face.

"Eat my Reeboks, Freak-Face": ACTUAL DIALOGUE

Our hero narrates each scene with his poindexter voice, his husky breath heaving and popping on the soundtrack as he records the dialogue too close to the mic jammed into the AUX socket of his Amiga, exclaiming "Sugar!" when in a near-death struggle so as not to offend the audience.
Occasionally, the killer speaks, and he hilariously sounds just like a walkman when the batteries are running out.

There is little to no direction given to the player as he stumbles through endless sequences of tree photography, or even a heads up on what to do when danger strikes. Thus, much death will occur as the player fails to realise when they were supposed to perform an action, or that those four grainy pixels in a murky photograph were actually an essential item that needed collecting.

Psycho Killer presents its myriad of gameplay options

I persevered after several deaths, and eventually found my way through the grotty fields to a jetty, where I simply sparked PSYCHO KILLER the fuck out with a pointed stick.
And that was that.

I'd completed the game. Less than forty five minutes after booting it.

On release, Psycho Killer cost around £30. I had finished it in a little over a half-hour, like you would a browser game on a rainy afternoon. This is hilarious today, when people now constantly bitch because some Blockbuster Xbox game was "only" 15 hours long.

Admittedly, I have been a bit mean to Psycho Killer, because at the end of the day, it was just a low budget production, and it at least deserves praise for having the inspiration to quickly latch on to the just-birthed Interactive Fiction market. A market that is still going today in its own form, with games such as Hotel Dusk and Virtue's Last Reward.
So I'm not bashing the game's developers for their work, though they should have known better than to cast some guy who looks like the school playground weed dealer as their machete wielding homicidal lunatic.

Seconds later, he fell into the river and drowned... OR DID HE? (yes, he did)

But Psycho Killer is a terrible game, far too expensive for its short and tiring experience. I would have been furious to have dropped that much cash on this back in the day.
It's probably the worst Interactive Movie ev....

..oh...never mind.



(From the internets: The game in its entirety, including Tutorial and death scenes)

Ryan Davis 1979-2013

"Hey folks, it's Tuuuuesday.."

On July 3rd 2013, videogame journalist Ryan Davis passed away whilst on his honeymoon with his new wife Anna. Ryan was 34 years old.

Davis had worked as a game journo for some time, having written for Gamespot in the late nineties right up to 2008 when he formed Giant Bomb along with another former Gamespot writer, Jeff Gerstmann.
I personally have trouble buying into many game review/news websites, for reasons too numerous and insignificant to go into here (Here's a hint: They're full of shit)
But I like a few, and I love Giant Bomb.

My dedication to the site has little to do with videogames, the reviews, the news, or even the presentation. I love Giant Bomb because I love the team, more importantly, I can believe them. The GB crew are a group of thirty-something gamers who reach out from the screen and become more than names at the bottom of articles.
The site has a legitimate irreverent aesthetic toward it. Not fake or forced. Video previews of the latest games come across as genuine and honest, a breath of fresh air in this horrendous "All Triple A games get 10/10 and a new article every day" mindset of modern day game journalism. You buy into the team and their work because they are relatable people, unable to hide their true opinions at the topic at hand, be it videogames, movies or the industry in general, not forgetting the frequent topic of underpriced, over-fried snack foods.

 
The weekly Giant Bombcast show has been a staple of my life for many years now and hours upon hours have been spent listening to Davis host the crew of Jeff, Brad, Vinny, Patrick and others as they break down every topic under the sun, with videogames quickly branching off into discussions about, TV, food, movies, pro-wrestling, phone apps or any number of random topics. It felt like a group of friends putting the world to rights and having a great time in each others company, whilst simultaneously spoiling those games you hadn't finished playing.
The Bombcast is a great escape for me and has legitimately helped see me through some pretty bleak and miserable times. It's always interesting and, more importantly, it's just so fucking funny.

The difference between the GB crew and many other sites editorial teams is that, week in, week out, the GB guys DO come to feel like your friends. After you spend years hearing them discuss their home lives, beliefs, opinions and ideals on a weekly basis you realise that you have come to know and love these people like you do friends you see in teh reel wurld.

This is also evidenced in that readers would constantly send in an abundance of treats and gifts, bizarre drinks, weird international snackfoods and even art for the studio walls. The GB crew have opened themselves up, unashamedly and honestly, to the point that the readers actually care about and respect them as individual people.

And so, when the death of Ryan Davis was announced, every reader felt like they had a lost a genuine friend, a man who was a part of their lives every single week.
The outpouring of grief on the site was all along the same lines. Most of the comments would be people talking about feeling like they'd lost "a real friend" or people showing confusion over how they could be so upset over the death of someone "That they'd never met"
Since then, various reader artwork, videos and blog tributes (such as this effort) have sprung up online in rememberance of the mighty man and his awe-inspiring beard. 

This shows just how big a part of the readers' lives Giant Bomb and its team are.
Giant Bomb isn't a place you go to find out what score some generic shooter got, or who has been announced for some fighting game's DLC. It's a place you go to escape, to be entertained and cheered up, to hear funny but intelligent discussion on videogames and the industry itself, to hear honest and real opinions on a myriad of subjects, to see what the crew thought of that shitty film you saw at the flicks last night, or just to laugh at grumpy men failing to play Kinect.
Giant Bomb is Ryan's lasting legacy, and it is glorious.

In the bigger picture of things, Ryan Davis' death doesn't even register with the majority of the world, much like most passings don't every day.
But for the GB readers, the crew, his family and friends and of course myself, to have known him in any capacity and to be able to mourn him is an both an honour and an absolute privilege.

Thanks for all the awesome times Ryan. We wish you were still here and you will never, ever be forgotten.

You would have thought this article was cheesy as fuck Davis, so I balanced it out with terrible pictures.

Street Fighter Cross Gamers

(Or: How following the wacky rules led me to CRIME. Or: Capcom? whut happen?)

I love fighting games. They're my favourite genre. I'll give them all a go, even if I'm really not taken in by the style or presentation of a new game, I'll always log it, because who knows what untold joys you could discover, and for every Rise of the Robots, there's a Skullgirls.
As a huge, life-long fan of the Street Fighter and Tekken series, I was surprised and intrigued by the announcement of Capcom's Street Fighter X Tekken, which planned to take beloved characters from two very, very different games and present them in the same scrap, on an even battlefield, in a bout of fisticuffs surely for the ages.
My interest went through the roof when some of the roster was revealed, I knew some of my Tekken faves were on board, like Lili and Asuka, along with Juri and Ibuki on the Capcom side.

For moar dollar, you too can have your favourite characters look like other characters. If you like.

The reveal of Poison, my favourite Capcom character of all time, took this to eleven. They stuck Cammy and Nina in for my good buddy, and with that, a really exciting game was on the horizon. I would not get my dream Zafina vs Rose fortune-teller wars, but I was good to go.

It had Poison. POISON.

Oh yes please.

Oh, but how it all went so very wrong, like, mind-screwingly bad in so many departments. SF x Tekken would turn out to be the first shot in 2012 that would secure Capcom a standing in the list of "Most-spectacular-tumble-from-the-top-in-a-single-year-by-any-company-not-called-WCW.
It was such a mess of a product that it's almost satire, and for those who didn't experience it, a quick opinion hunt online will tell you all you need to know.

I didn't make this.

The game was released, and I wasn't really feeling it, it wasn't bad per se, it was bright and colourful, had cool character models and somehow managed to make the full contact, hand-to-hand based Tekken fighters stand toe-to-toe with the cowardly, fireball-tossing Street Fighters. I've played much worse fighting games.
But it all felt like such an anti-climax, it was all so low-key, vanilla and bland.
I didn't like the lack of stages, some badly overpowered characters, nasty infinite combos, strict time limits and a dull, go nowhere storyline.
But way beyond that were the horrendous sound issues on Xbox, the terrible Pandora mechanic, the tacky costumes and, above all, the offensive, game-breaking Gem mechanic, where you could essentially pay to have ridiculously overpowered teams. With so many variants available it single handedly ensured you left your audience exasperated, bored and rolling back to their tried and tested fighting games where your opponents skill level didn't vary based on the amount of money the player had spent bulletproofing their characters.

On top of all this, the gaming community turned viciously on Capcoms ridiculous decision to lock an abundance of characters away on the disc, along with costumes and even edit colours, as if Ono has a copyright on Blue (the colour, not the circa 2003 boyband.)
The fans spoke with their wallets, or more accurately, on whiny forums, and Capcom eventually apologised for the abortion of a marketing disaster that was On-Disc-DLC. They made comment about the DLC having a different "Value" to the rest of the data which is why it was locked away. This would be hilariously right for the wrong reasons, as we'd find out when the PS Vita version was released.

Now that's the negative overview, and its a much-told and ancient story that you likely already know. But here's a more amusing, personal aside, and an incredible sign of how badly modern day publisher practices play out in teh reel wurld.

As I've mentioned, I love the characters in this game, and I like the games concept and can enjoy the fights themselves sans Gems/Pandora, but after trying the Xbox version and seeing the bugs, along with hearing how many characters were locked away on the £40 disc I did not own (apparently)
I decided to try and get the full experience, fairly, but as cheaply as possible, as any individual might.

Push on a year and the PC version of the game finally gets the extra character DLC, months and months after the console owners. As an apology for the delay, Capcom offers this PC DLC at a reduced price, but for two weeks only.
I can roll with that. I'm thinking, if I can get the game and all the DLC for about £15-18, then its worth the price.
So, I'll buy the PC version of SF x Tekken at a good price, add the cheap DLC and I'll have a fun, good value fighting game with a great roster that I can dip into a couple of times a year.

But the best laid plans of mice and men never encountered modern videogaming.
 
Firstly, I go to Steam, I cannot afford the base game at the time, but I reckon I'll pick up the DLC now whilst the offer is on and then get the base game in a couple of weeks when I can afford it.
Steam however, won't sell me the DLC because I don't have the base game.
Ok, so I buy a brand new copy cheap off teh intarwebz. When it arrives I sync it to Steam.
Except I don't, because the Games For Windows version isn't compatible with Steam.

Guess I've got to buy the DLC from within the game itself then? Fair enough.
Except, when attempting that, I find that going that route does not include the discount.

By now, I've spent way longer than I cared on the whole debacle, so, I go to a great Street Fighter modders site, download a couple of patches, break the game, and get all the characters and costumes free of charge.
Because in the face of all the hurdles, and despite trying to do things "the right way" they have made it so consistently difficult to actually go through the proper channels that I give up and just go down Hackers Boulevard.

Me and the guys, I'm the one with the bowlcut.

I was presented with so many fucking hoops to leap through, after they already had my money, that I was exasperated with playing within their wacky circus and eventually resorted to the generic "warez" culture that so many people live by daily when it comes to all their videogame consumerism.

So, to summarise:

-I bought the game brand new on 360, but it had bugs and missing features, plus Capcom wanted nearly 50% of money I'd already handed over for the game AGAIN to give me characters that were on the disc I'd already purchased.

-Nearly a year later, Capcom released those characters for the PC version at a cheaper price, provided you bought the DLC within their time limit.

-I tried to buy the DLC from Steam, but I wasn't allowed because I didn't own the base game yet.

-I bought the base game from Amazon (My second new purchase of the product)

-I then find I can't sync it with Steam. This deprives me, and anyone else who purchased a hard copy of the game, the DLC discount.

-I try to buy the DLC from within the game itself, but it's full price.

-I cheat and hack the DLC.

I'm not a hack/warez guy. All my games are legitimate copies, I've spent an abundance of money on games, accessories and occasionally DLC, so, regardless of how you view my decision, theres no arguing with the fact that I tried several times to do things by their ridiculously convoluted bullshit ways, but they just kept throwing up more barriers.

The mad irony is, I don't really care about SF x Tekken as a game. I just like its roster and can't turn down the opportunity to have my favourite Chick with Dick at my beck and call. Gawd knows I waited long enough for her playable debut (Not counting that unbearable Final Fight game for the Sega Saturn)

Oh no thanks

So, if I didn't even care that much about owning this game, and even I was turned off by all the barriers and BS, then how the hell are publishers expecting casual fans, newcomers or just "Oh, I'll give this a go" impulse buyers to make the same effort?

This is just one story, and its a totally unimportant one in the bigger picture of life, but I like it as a sign of how all the barriers put in place to prevent hacking and to make more money directly caused the opposite of said activity to take place.
As such you may see it from a different viewpoint than mine. Maybe you feel I've committed a crime, or maybe you feel that I should have just gone without, and yes, you would have weight to an argument as such.

Me, gleefully enjoying my HUGE saving of £4, despite paying twice for a game I feel so-so about..

But this isn't a tale about the grey areas of piracy, DLC, hacking or any of the above.
It's simply me suggesting to Capcom, if you had put all those costumes and characters right there, ready to play, for all to enjoy, on all formats, on day freaking one, you might not have looked liked total bastards in the eyes of the gaming community and maybe SF x Tekken would still be a semi-interesting game played in the Fighting Game Community today, instead of it being this dead-in-the-water, nothing niche title that is only referred to in mocking tones and pointed at as an example of everything thats wrong in modern day game marketing.

In the past I bought Capcom's Street Fighter IV, then I upgraded to Super a year later and then I purchased the Arcade Edition upgrade. This isn't about my financial commitment to Capcom, a company I've supported with my voice and my wallet on a variety of formats for over fifteen years.

People were sold a game at full price, had a huge, huge chunk of content locked away from them, got different characters in different versions, received DLC months apart from each other at differing prices, were given the option to pay money to make winning easier and, in the case of the Xbox version, had to suffer horrible bugs and even features listed in the manual that weren't actually available in the game.

These characters have no monetary worth in handheld form apparently

The ultimate hypocrisy faceslap was when all the characters came unlocked on the PS Vita release of the game day one, essentially calling shenanigans on the previous claim that the DLC has a seperate value, as clearly Capcom weren't losing out by having one format fully unlocked.

So the DLC is worth X on consoles, but a differing X on PC and is worth a big fat zero for Vita??

Want to have an issue with my morals??

This one, I see what they did.

This one, not so much.

Capcom have been playing sneaky games with the fans for a few years now, but 2012 was the year when the fans called them on it. The Marvel vs Capcom "Ultimate" upgrade, On-Disc-DLC and Pay-To-Win tropes all contributed to Capcom losing their "A" ranking on the Better Business Bureau website.
How can this be the same company that a few short years ago gave us Street Fighter IV with at least eight free, unlockable characters?
Last year we saw Capcom butcher a franchise, rightfully considered by many to be the company's crown jewel, with the abhorrent Resident Evil 6 and Raccoon City games.
The once mighty developer/publisher that was a flag-bearer for quality and excellence for so long has fallen hard from grace, and has been shit-listed along with internet favourite targets EA, Activision and Ubisoft.


The worst part is, I like Capcom and I love so many of their games, worlds, and characters, my youth was spent with Mega Man, Muscle Bomber and the Street Fighter series.
Final Fight is one of my very favourite games of all time. Same goes for Resident Evil II. And Rival Schools.
If you're reading this and thinking I'm just another Capcom hater then you're very, very wrong, I've always liked Capcom and I think they've produced some amazing games with incredible longevity to their franchises and great service to their fans.
And that's the problem.

How in the blue hell did we end up here?

I really hope that Capcom can step it up for the next generation and reclaim the throne, hit some real humdingers out of the park and restore the fans faith in both their games and their reputation as a solid, trustworthy company.

To be fair, given recent announcements, they might be off to a good start.....

I guess they can relate to this guy.