I guess I should have titled this Autism Vs. Capcom, because if I ever really get consistently good at this game I'll be able to do absurd mathematical calculations at Rain Man speed. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Yesterday, I told you that my PlayStation took a shit on me. In what I'm now thinking was probably disgust, I decided to play my Wii for the first time since... well, you know. Anyway, after doing what little research that I deemed necessary on the subject, it seems almost abundantly clear that last year was a pretty damn good year for Wii games: Super Mario Galaxy 2 is on many (many, many) best-of lists, Kirby's Epic Yarn has seen universally strong reviews, as have Donkey Kong Country Returns and Cave Story. And that's just the big stuff. A lot of people, though, seemed to have forgotten Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom.
This is fine, really. It did come out last January, and unless your name is "Mass Effect 2" then coming out in January means that folks are going to forget that you exist when the spring rolls around. This is where you also pour one out for No More Heroes 2. Sad, but I don't make the rules. Now, to be fair, this wasn't exactly a game that got completely looked over when it first hit retail. From what I recall, sales numbers were pretty good; at least good enough that Capcom went ahead with plans for Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 (which, and I could be wrong about this, but TvC was the deciding factor).
Now, I'll preface this by saying that I play a lot of Street Fighter. Notice that I didn't say that I was especially good at Street Fighter, but a SF game is played more often in my home than just about anything else by a landslide. My fundamentals are good, and I can hang pretty well online in 4 and HDR. When I finally met my local crowd of tournament players, I could hang with them, too. This is about where they decided to try and teach my Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 -a game I have never cared for. Too little choice at high level. Too frenetic. Too much. Not for me. Anyway, the guy whom I was learning from, a hepcat named Chris who runs a bigger midwest tourney called Seasons Beatings in October, told me completely straight faced that by learning MvC2, I would be good (or at least better) at every other fighting game I'll ever play. At first, I thought this was arrogant. After a while, I see what he meant.
Fast forward a year or so and we get TvC, a game I bought day one. Now I won't bore you by bringing up the common mud slung at it like "it shouldn't have been on the Wii" and "there's no competition, it's a dead scene." But I will level a few strikes against it now a year removed from a release date:
First, it is a misconception that there is not crowd or competition for this game. It isn't often that I go online with it and not find an opponent. The problem is that fringe players are gone at this point and we're mostly left with the hard core. This is something that you should expect; even Super Street Fighter 4 will ge to this point eventually. It just happened a bit faster in TvC's case, making picking it back up after nearly a year like climbing Everest without a rope. This being the first game I played when I decided to started playing my Wii again I knew what I was getting into, but I still needed to spend some time in Training Mode to get my thumbs up to snuff.
That brings me to the second major problem: there just aren't that many stick options. Yes, you can find the MadCatz Fightstick on the internet for around 40 bones (which is a pretty good deal), but your only other option is to get a PS-to-GameCube converter and plug in a custom (if you have one) or an older stick that may just have laying around. Me? I live in a smallish apartment with a wife and wifestuff (which is now a word), and the PS3 MadCatz TE stick is about all I can justify, especially if I'm not playing this game every night to get ready for a tournaments (which I'll probably enter as far as this game is concerned). I'm stuck with a classic controller. I am gimped.
Lastly, and probably most crushing, is that the Wii's online components just aren't that good. Now, I will say that I just started Monster Hunter Tri (we'll get to that later) and haven't fully tested that game's online portions yet, so TvC is really the only litmus test that I have, but it never feels like 100% to me. The thing is, the Wii is a wi-fi machine with no innate hard wiring. In comparison to playing online via wi-fi to my PS3 and Street Fighter 4, there are more consistent lag-free matches on the PlayStation (I tested this. You should have been there; it was downright scientific). After grabbing the USB LAN adapter for the Wii things got a little better, but probably 50% of the time I get a good, stable fight. This is a problem, especially if you want to get better at the game. If there's no level playing field, it's just about impossible to rise to the level of an opponent better than you.
But TvC is good. It's not as chaotic as its Vs. game predecessors, but still nuts enough that you have to be acutely aware of everything around (meter level, opponent meter, height of attacks, how much beer you have left, etc.). In flipping on the Wii after so long, I actually feel kind of bad that I let this game languish for so many months. I find myself back to looking up combo videos on YouTube and checking the Shoryuken message boards for the first time since Super SF4 dropped. As far as Wii games go, it looks pretty effing good. But I don't need to sell it to you.
All I need now is some local competition. Online, too. That's where you come in, I guess.
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