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Vampire Chronicle for Matching Service
  DCFightingJ  
  opened by paleface at 03:21:29 11/21/04  
  last modified by paleface at 12:25:50 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=DC; cat=Fighting; reg=JPN]
           
Reference added: 679
  "Capcom's "Matching Service" internet fighting games for Japan."
 
A sorta mix of the entire Vampire (Darkstalkers) series all in one game, so you can select what kind of life meters and fighting styles you want to have--for instance you can go with separate rounds with life meters reset between rounds, Vampire-style, or long rounds where you just take two falls out of three, Savior-style.
 
It's an interesting choice, and I suppose the easiest way to try to satisfy everyone. The problem is that the main bulk of gamers still won't care, and the hardcore types who might have cared may be turned off by the wacky blend of game elements. Certainly, what would have been cooler would have been completely separate full ports of all of the games in the series.
 
Not that I'm going to complain much, mind you--and I'm really not hardcore enough to perceive most of the differences between the different styles and so forth. I just like the crazy Vampire characters and their fantastic fighting animations, oh and I rather like the one-round-long style of the later games in the series.
 
Like their other "for Matching Service" DC fighter, Super Street Fighter II X (see entry 679), supposedly in Japan you could take this online and duke it out in slightly-lagged networked combat. I suppose that accounts for the single-player aspect of the game being rather overlooked--if you want to play "Arcade" mode, you'll find that you just shoot right through to the end after six or seven matches, which really doesn't seem like a lot. The only other mode is a standard practice mode.
 
Now, sticklers might also bitch about the presentaion of the graphics here, since they've basically been scaled in a noticeable way to fit in the DC's resolution without looking warped. I always find it amusing that people accuse poor Capcom of redrawing the sprites in this type of situation--that's the very last thing that they ever want to do, people. No, they just have to resort to some rather messy rescaling tricks to fit the odd CPS arcade resolution into a 640x480 high-res DC screen, and when considered in that light, the end result isn't really all that bad. If you're going to bitch about it not being a "pixel-perfect" conversion, well, I got news for you: that simply isn't possible, so shut the hell up and be happy that they made this game at all.
 
It's legitimate to knock them for not supporting RGB output here, though: if you try running the game in RGB you only see a quarter of the screen. That *was* sloppy any way you slice it. At least it supports VGA though, so I have to confess that I don't really care about RGB.
 
Single-player-shafted hack job it may be, but it still manages to feel like Vampire, which means lightning-fast, colorful and incredibly imaginative animation in a funky pop-gothic theme, and I like it. Oh, and the final boss isn't a complete bastard (*cough* SNK *cough*), which is refreshing.
    
 
references:
· Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (PSP)
· Super Street Fighter II X for Matching Service (DC)
· Vampire: Darkstalkers Collection (PS2)

 
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