Capcom’s X-Men vs Street Fighter is the title that started all of the crossover madness that 2D Fighting game lovers like myself cherish. While it had its share of flaws, I recalled the early days of the arcades when infinite loops weren’t discovered, Wolverine was king and variety was the spice of life. Nothing beats the raw arcades when a title is new and everyone is playing it. 3GK and company has spent hundreds of dollars in quarters/tokens plugging away at that game beating people and getting beat by people only wishing to use our favorite characters.

My team was Rogue and Storm, I loved the voice acting for Rogue and ending a combo in a kiss then having the other person’s signature move led into more creative combos along with adding insult to injury. I relished in ending a character using his own move like doing a 360 pile driver on Zangief or Dragon punching Ken out of the screen. Storm was all aerial annoyance as I would combo someone all the way up to the top of the screen and landing them into a lightning storm before allowing them to fall. My first tournament in X-Men vs Street Fighter turned me off immensely when I saw that the chess game I adored had become a cheese-fest of infinites as I witnessed a Storm user do my combo then throw his opponent only to loop the combo again infinitely. It was a sobering wake-up call to the versus series as they all have suffered from this throughout the sequels.

Recently we had Capcom vs Marvel 2 ported to PSN and X-Box Live so I hope for a kickback to this original. The version that I own on Playstation is laughably limited (no tags) so I hope for a real arcade port of this awesome classic.