The Wind Cries Marvel

Everyone loves surprises, don’t they? Last year, I was pleasantly surprised by Criterion’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

As racing games go, I generally can’t be arsed with them. Forza Motorsport drew me in with its rampant amount of car customisation, as did Need for Speed: Underground 2 for similar reasons. Sure I played the races and stuff but ultimately only to further my leet customisation skills. Until Hot Pursuit came along with its brilliant graphics and the intense feeling of speed, I just couldn’t sit down and play any form of racing game and enjoy it.

Until Hot Pursuit came along, I was all but ready to give up on the racing game genre entirely. I think the main reason I loved it so much was because of the striking resemblance it bears to quite simply the greatest and best film in the world. To be honest, I’m surprised that film doesn’t have a modern video game adaption of its own — but I suspect that may change in due course. It bloody better!

I had a similar gaming epiphany with Starcraft 2 upon its release. In all honesty, I couldn’t have cared less about Starcraft 2 or its “amazing” precursory title. And that was how it was right up until I was sitting in a restaurant with my family and happened to notice the launch trailer for it playing on the TV above the bar. I was almost blown away by it. It was epic, it was action-packed and it was brilliant – I fell in love with it. It was a day one purchase and I couldn’t have cared less about the real-time strategy genre at all. Looking at it now however, it still hasn’t changed that viewpoint.

Starcraft 2 is a brilliant game offline, but as soon as you try a ranked match against a stranger, you’ll be getting pounded into dust providing you haven’t got the original Starcraft hard-wired into your brain. Also worth pointing out is that the offline mode is technically only a third of a game, there’s still two races worth of campaign to play through before the story properly concludes, and these two-thirds have barely even been developed yet.

My relationship with beat ’em ups is in a similar state. We’ve just never seen eye to eye. I could say that this was purely because games such as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are shit but I’m not going to, for two reasons:

1. The internet doesn’t like it when you disagree.
2. I’d be lying through my teeth.

The truth is, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are extremely enjoyable…when you’re winning or even in a position where winning is a possibility and not just sheer luck; therein lies the rub – I’m utter shite at fighting games. It was at a preview for Super Street Fighter 4 that I first met some of the nightmarish horrors lovely folk from Ready Up (which was, admittedly, my main reason for being there in the first place) but I also got a few games of Super Street Fighter 4 in as well. Needless to say I got mashed into a ginger pulp. I did however manage to beat Dan once, Scott two or three times and Michael about a billion times. If only I could win more often!

You’ll be surprised to hear then at just how damned excited I am for Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds. Sometimes when a game is almost out, some occurrence or other just makes me become infatuated with a specific unreleased game — this happened to me with Red Dead Redemption after I swiped a box set of Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns for the low, low price of cheap. I’d watched all four of the films and immediately wanted to be the Man With No Name and realised that that could be possible (well, sort of) with Red Dead Redemption.

With Marvel vs. Capcom 3, I can only assume that my obsession began somewhere around the time that either Bionic Commando‘s Rad Spencer (or to be more precise, his sulky and uninteresting alter-ego, Nathan Spencer) or Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins‘ Sir Arthur were announced. Just looking at the line-up tells me that it’s going to be a damned fun game — the amount of variation between the characters is wild to say the least.

I haven’t even mentioned how much of a godsend the ‘Simple Mode’ is going to be either. As I mentioned before, I’m dreadful at beat ’em ups and it’s mostly due to my complete inability to comprehend combos. Simple Mode changes all that, relegating three buttons worth of dishing out justice to a single button. In theory, I should be unbeatable with Simple Mode on — hopefully my lengthy sessions grinding the X button into paste with Dynasty Warriors 5 will pay off.

I. AM. SO. EXCITED.