paleface [sys=DC; cat=Fighting; reg=JPN] |
| | Capcom polished up their "ratio" and "groove" systems to come up with one hell of a configurable and fun fighting game here. You can choose from six "grooves" for your team, from something like Samurai Shodown's "Rage" meter to one of Street Fighter Alpha's "Isms"; or you can design your own in the Groove Editor. As for ratios, they aren't baked into characters now: you can set any of the tons of Capcom and SNK characters to whatever ratio you like, adding up to four points. Take a juggernaut four-point Eagle against four one-point whimps? Why not? Like the previous one (see entry 813) you've also got a Color Edit mode here. In addition, there's a replay mode and a Network mode: I think you could play online via dialup service in Japan or something. I like the happy-go-lucky style of the announcer here, although I know he annoys some folks. I also like the techno-pop music ("This is the true love we're makin'--True love we're makin', true love we're makin'...") and the highly-animated 3D backdrops--I still have a fondness for the high-res 2D backgrounds of the first game, but ah well, such is the inevitable march of what they call "progress." As with the first, the presentation is gorgeous, and what with the increased content, the game reaches a level of richness to which few fighting games can aspire. Single-player Arcade mode is a little lengthier this time around, thankfully, but there's still nothing in the way of story or whatever. And, as with the previous one, the AI is sometimes a little suspect. With the beefed-up character roster and groove/ratio stuff to play with, though, you probably won't run out of variety any time soon. Oh yeah, and instead of going down to four button SNK-style, this time they bumped everyone up to six button Capcom-style, which works nicely. |
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| | Download added: rockin.mpg (10829828 bytes) "I flail around with characters whose moves I don't know." No English language option, alas, so win quotes are in Japanese. |
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| | Oh yeah, there's a Survival mode this time around, nice to have when you tire of the Arcade mode, which you probably will pretty quick. Speaking of which, I seem to recall that the Arcade-mode bosses are pretty nasty beasts, in contrast to the bosses in the prequel, who were actually not much more fearsome than the regular fights--I rather liked that. |
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| | Note to myself: all I gotta do to unlock the things I want (Akuma, Rugal, their rainy stage, and Groove Edit Mode) is get through Arcade while scoring between 1000 and 1500 Groove Points (use ratio 4 King's Trap Shot--but not too much). Easy-peasy. : ) |
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| | I'd been thinking I'd stick with VERSUS (CPU) mode, but the difficulty level doesn't go all that high, and anyway it's kind of a pain to have to set up both teams for each match. And I'd thought I kind of hated Arcade Mode, but I'm not sure why--possibly because the boss battles are kind of ridiculous, but actually if you're bad at combos like me, and thus don't get many Groove Points, there isn't necessarily much danger Arcade Mode will even end at a boss! : D Characters in CvS2 have 8 colors: the 6 action buttons, plus ABC and XYZ--normally those would be 3 punches/kicks each, but of course the game doesn't adjust to use your remapped buttons (grr Capcom why did you always, always fail to do this???), so for me it's LP,MP,MK and LK,HP,HK. And it seems like you may have to hold them for a split second--so don't try to peck all three at once quickly, but instead press and hold all three for a few seconds, maybe. (At any rate, with Iori/Terry/Rock for instance I had tried a 3-button color, quick-press-stylee, and had managed to fluff it on both Iori and Rock, leaving them with default colors. ; P) Someone else put together an alphabetical character color chart: https://imgur.com/a/gBjR2OL . The colors in this game are quite well done. : ) |
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| | Infinite Survival mode: It's an unusual Survival mode; usually they're set up to chip health away from you gradually, match after match; in this one, you gain back sometimes 80% of a life bar between matches, so matches are more of an all-or-nothing affair--which I kind of like! Not so much of the creeping inevitable doom feel of standard Survival modes. ; ) The difficulty ramps up quickly (which is also good; too many Survival modes just waste your time for 10 or 20 matches :P), and it's way tougher than Arcade Mode. I've got a lot of work to do to get better at it! I wonder how tough the 10th match (mini?)boss is; if they're much tougher than the regular opponents I might not have much hope of clearing them for a long time--probably I should be doing "All Survival" instead of 8 Survival; I guess I'll know if and when I ever get that far, but I suppose for now it's nicer to see a smaller breakdown of foes. ; ) Notes: - In the middle-ish of the video I went into Options to look at the difficulty setting, but eh usually those don't matter in Survival modes, which tend to have a fixed difficulty level--not sure if CvS2's does or not - I also turned Autosave on, because I was getting prompted to save (or not) after each Survival session--but then I still got prompted; went back to check after stopping the recording and found Autosave ON had somehow *not* saved via its own autosave--so now I've manually saved Autosave. Will it stick? : oo |
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| | Hah the music in this game is so loud you can't really hear my blathering, which is just as well since I'm just confused about how the heck to use Kyosuke's special moves. (Next time I'll take the volume down by about -5 dB; no this game does not have a separate music volume slider, heck it doesn't have any volume adjustment at all: Dreamcast was LOUD and you were GOING TO LIKE IT.) Anyway here I was trying out Kyosuke Kagami in Infinite Survival mode of Capcom vs. SNK 2: Millionaire Fighting 2001 on Dreamcast! And not really getting very far, but for some reason that didn't bother me and I kept going back for more!
0:00 - Inf. Survival 1 5:13 - Inf. Survival 2 10:31 - Inf. Survival 3 12:41 - Inf. Survival 4 18:21 - Inf. Survival 5 22:16 - Inf. Survival 6 25:05 - Inf. Survival 7 29:35 - Inf. Survival 8 34:54 - Inf. Survival 9 39:40 - Inf. Survival 10 44:50 - Inf. Survival 11 49:51 - Inf. Survival 12 51:53 - Inf. Survival 13 59:03 - high scores 1:00:40 - wrap-up & what's next! (yo, inaudible 'p') I'd managed to forget that this Survival mode is an unusual one: you get almost ALL your health back after each match at first, then it's slightly less that you get back, and slightly less, and slightly less... The difficulty is easy in the first two matches, then gets sickeningly difficult. Yet somehow this all works for me! : D Not sure if I can make Kyosuke really work for me. I'm pretty okay with his regular moves, except I keep forgetting his upward-thrusting down-forward (or just down?) heavy kick is short range, probably for use as an anti-air. Speaking of anti-airs, he has not one but TWO uppercut-style special moves: his forward-down-df-Punch--classic Street Fighter shoto character dragon punch motion--whips an electrical charge almost full screen height, but has very low horizontal range, and comes out so slowly you'd have to have better reflexes than I do to do it as a reaction to the faster jump-in attacks that will come at you; his NOT dragon punch input but rather quarter-circle-forward-Kick attack flip kick covers space much more like a standard uppercut move--it's just such an unusual input for a move like that I'm having trouble getting used to it. ; ) And if that one is more like a regular uppercut, what is his harder-to-use regular-uppercut-input move for? Hitting exceptionally high jump-in attacks? His classic fireball motion quarter-circle-forward-Punch sends two energy butterflies sine-waving across the screen: "Cross Cutter" covers an unusually tall height range for a fireball, but *not* quite a full screen horizontal range. Against certain fireballs, such as Ryo's, one butterfly will cancel his fireball and the other will go on to hit him, which is awesome--but a taller fireball like Terry's will take out both of them, or so it seemed. So again, a quirky twist on a standard shoto move. Instead of a "tatsu" spin kick shoto thing as his "third" special, Kyosuke's got qcbP, a slow, looping flight through the air with an electrical fist; it looks like it might hit against airborne characters, but doesn't; it's far too slow to catch the AI if they're just standing around, since they see it coming a mile away; it seems intended to be used as a reaction counter to enemy fireballs--as I managed to use it once to loop over Terry's fireball and hit him. But the max range heavy punch version only covers maybe a little over half the screen, so you have to be standing uncomfortably close to the enemy fireballer to threaten them with it. Another kind of tricky to use move! He doesn't feel like an outright bad character to me, and I particularly like his jumping medium kick, with its long down-thrust leg that seems to catch the AI out more than usual--but his specials are quirky, and probably meant as fast reaction counter-moves, which is definitely not my speciality. ; ) Kyosuke's color palettes are all pretty samey; the craziest he gets is that his three-punches color has white hair instead of blond, and three-kicks Kyosuke is slightly purple. |
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| | Playing Maki Genryusai in Infinite Survival mode of Capcom vs. SNK 2: Millionaire Fighting 2001 on Dreamcast!
0:00 - start 1:33 - run 1 7:47 - run 2 17:27 - run 3 19:22 - run 4 24:38 - run 5 29:52 - run 6 34:56 - run 7 40:07 - run 8 46:44 - run 9 56:59 - wrap-up & what's next! Man, I always felt like Maki was cool but never really felt like I got her; I still don't have a handle on her running moves but strangely enough they seem to do pretty well just coming out on their own sometimes ;), leaving me free just to concentrate on her regular moves; her three-kicks mash is a good get-offa-me; her kick throw (then mash the controls for more hits) is great for building Groove points, plus it just looks cool and painful. I'm not so good with her supers but that's okay, that's why I took Rage meter for my custom Groove. ; ) |
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| | Finally figured out that to get the 3 punches or 3 kicks character select color (and I had these backwards, it's my PS4 stick's LK+HP+HK combo--which I have mapped from []+/\+R1--that gets the 3 punches color, and LP+MP+MK--actually X+O+R2--to get the 3 kicks color) requires pressing all three buttons together very precisely, and releasing them quickly! It's way more finicky than it should be! : P |
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| | Boxer with SNK-style rolling and rage meter is something else! : D Even if I basically can't do charge attacks. ; D I really like the random opponent selection in Infinite Survival--you're limited to three fixed enemy orders in All Survival--but I'm less keen on the enforced miniboss every ten matches. This time out though I actually beat the first miniboss for apparently just the second time, so eh well I was much happier with the outcome. I'm going to try it some more but probably I will end up getting shut down by the stage 10 miniboss every time I make it that far and will go crawling back to All Survival, which at least usually doesn't have a miniboss until like stage 16 or something. That music glitch seemed to start when I paused the game to quit right after beginning an All Survival run as Boxer but finding I'd yet again failed to key in his three-punches color with the proper super-tight timing. Almost like I was running my own AST! ; ) Except it was extremely irritating and only from the right speaker: playing the previous music track on top of the current music track, or looping a split-second of the track during non-music between-match segments. On the plus side of glitches though, looks like it was changing Ducking sound filter settings in my OBS recording software that kept glitching my mic/game sound switching a bit when I'd try to tighten that up, but rebooting the computer after changing the settings--although probably all you need to do is restart OBS, but I'm paranoid--seems to clear it up, so I've finally got the filter set to the proper value (original default, 60 ms, which oddly differs by a factor of 10 from from the wiki's "recommended" 600 ms listing https://obsproject.com/wiki/Filters-Guide#sidechain-compressionducking ) for seamless aural hand-off there, so basically there should be no more awkward momentary game silence after I stop yapping. |
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| | ~ Frames of light punch input lag on my set-up: Capcom vs SNK 2 Dreamcast: 3-4 Flycast: 1 |
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| | Playing Kyo Kusanagi in All Survival Mode of Capcom vs. SNK 2: Millionaire Fighting 2001 for Japanese Dreamcast, running in widescreen in Flycast! I had kind of run out of gas on CvS2 Survival (good heavens way back in mid-Jan 2022) and I still sorta felt that way here 'cause the movement is very Capcomy rather than SNK-sy like CvS Pro, but playing Kyo here started to grow on me, maybe I should do some more of this game. Works pretty good in widescreen. |
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| | Turns out I'm a terrible Yun = ooo |
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| | Download added: 11_yamazaki.png (43592 bytes) "Yamazaki Survival end portrait, transparent bg"
Hadn't noticed that was EVIL Ryu in the 8 spot (not 7 like I may have said : P) of Todo's (I keep wanting to spell it Todoh but TODO is how this game spells it) gauntlet! Gargh. The bosses in this game are bad enough, you gotta go put 'em in the midst of SURVIVAL runs??? whyyyy Anyway I'm not smart enough to use Yamazaki's sneaky specials but his normals are just so fun. ^ _^ Oh and yes, he's from the Fatal Fury series. ; ) |
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| | Download added: 12_raiden.png (54282 bytes) "Raiden portrait, native res transparent PNG"
Raiden's got too many tricky moves in this game so I ignored most of them. ; D Got on a crazy roll on that last run, weird difficulty levels here. ^ D^ |
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| | Download added: 14_kim.png (47731 bytes) "Kim's diamond"
Two back-to-back Kim Kaphwan sessions and I didn't enjoy either of 'em. Quickly maxed at eight wins. Worst against Kim! But my Kim is just so slow, kinda weak, trades a lot, gets thrown out of even successful dive kicks and that's like one of his two generally useful moves. Jump kicks all contact above his head--so he's really hard to use for jump kicks, except air-to-air--one of my best anti-Cammy characters! Just bizarre since he's so slow on a lot of misses / turnarounds. Got burned repeatedly by the likes of Joe, Dan, Todo, Benimaru, Yuri; lots of getting supered in the face. Enjoyed playing him just the other day in KOF 2000. Not here. Horrible colors aside from MP red/black. : P |
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| | I'm real bad with Kyo. But at least in 2000 I can apply wakeup pressure with his qcf+HP; couldn't seem to do that in CvSP. Also had a heck of a time landing his jHK! Maybe I should'a tried jHP. In CvS2 he feels like he's a bit more capable offensively; those Medium attack buttons help. I guess I'm gonna try playing Pro on a faster speed--Turbo 3 instead of the default (through Free pick) Turbo 2! = o (Turbo 4 is ridiculous.) Playing CvS2 right after 1, 2 felt tremendously slow. On speed 5/5 (default? 3/5), it's maybe a bit too fast for me. The Run in that game does start to feel less slow than it is normally as you increase the game speed, at least. |
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