I was recently looking for a new lock screen and background for my phone and decided I wanted to go with a Street Fighter theme. I typed in “Ken vs Ryu wallpaper” into Google, hit images, and scrolled through hundreds of images that came up. The one that ended up as my lock screen was this.
Now forgive me if I’m off I’m wrong, but I’m fairly certain this is from my favorite fighting game, Capcom vs SNK 2. These are the sprites of Ken and Ryu when they face off against one another. They give a little fist bump, Ken slides back a few feet, and the battle begins. In one of the Alpha games, a match between Ken and Ryu will begin with Ken having Ryu in a headlock, giving him a noogie, and then Ryu tosses Ken over to his starting position. That’s not quite relevant to this, but it’s another neat little intro involving these two that I thought I’d share anyway.
I started thinking back about how much fun I used to have playing Capcom vs SNK 2 (the Playstation 2 version) with my brother when we could visit one another and playing on Xbox Live (which is, sadly, no longer an option) against random people. I decided to dust off my copy and throw down against the computer on my Playstation 3. While its character sprites or backgrounds are nowhere near as pretty or fluid as say King of Fighters XIII, CvS2 still holds up surprisingly well graphically.
What really impressed me was the level of detail and care that was put into the special opening character animations. Most of these would be lost on your casual fans, but knowing your Samurai Shodown or Rival Schools characters, you’d be in for a treat. While the whole premise of the game is a crossover of characters that have no business fighting each other, Capcom went above and beyond by adding these little interactions with certain characters that might have some sort of personality similarity or clash. Does having Ken toss Terry his hat, Zangief and Raiden struggling with one another, Bison trying to recruit Iori, or Geese and Rock having an obviously uncomfortable father-son exchange add anything mechanically? Of course not. It does show how much thought and care went into Capcom vs SNK 2, which remains my favorite fighting game over ten years since its release.
Of course, what kind of ass would I be if I didn’t put up a video of all the special interactions?
