Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection offers a key feature that just might convince players to seek out the physical version in particular.
As reported by Nintendo Life, the physical version of Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection will have all the games complete at the onset. That means regardless if your get the game on a Switch cartridge or PlayStation 4 disc, you won’t need to go online to download any of the games. If Capcom does patch the game in the future, and you can’t patch it, you will still be able to play these games.
Of course, the actual sizes for these games are negligible, given these are mostly based on CPS-1 and CPS-2 arcade games. But even Marvel Vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes, which ran on Sega’s NAOMI arcade board, and is definitely the biggest game in the collection, is still smaller than most modern games.
It’s likely that all these games will fit in the 4GB Switch cartridge, though we will have to wait and see when the games finally release. We already know that Capcom is bringing original arcade ROMs, but have also made changes that were not present before. For example, the light effects have been modified so that they will no longer harm people who have photosensitivity, or potentially cause seizures.
While this one wasn’t likely to be a difficult choice for Capcom, it’s a meaningful choice for the players for multiple reasons. Switch users in particular, have been burned with being sold supposed physical retail copies of games, only to find out that some games in a collection, or parts of games, are not in the cart and have to be downloaded. But that’s not everything.
The hardcore fans of the Marvel arcade games Capcom made, they have lived through several delistings through the years. The 2009 rerelease of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 made fans think that they would have the game conveniently available moving forward, so the subsequent delisting of that version in 2012 stung particularly hard.
While less impactful, the digital release of Marvel vs. Capcom Origins also made fans feel burned. This digital only release bundled Marvel Super Heroes and Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes, and boasted GGPO-based online. This was released in 2012, and then unceremoniously delisted in 2014, giving players only two years to have a chance to buy it for themselves.
So yes, as surprising as it is, this rerelease of several 30+ year old games is a really big deal for video game preservation. Even if the Switch and PlayStation 4 eventually give way to newer console generations, having those games on physical will keep those fans satisfied in the years to come.
