Capcom’s Latest Collection Of Arcade Classics Gives The Punisher Its Due

Folks, I think Capcom is doing the work that most of the industry seems allergic to. Companies like Digital Eclipse are enshrining historical moments of gaming culture with releases like The Making of Karateka, but Capcom appears to be one of the few AAA devs and publishers actively preserving its own legacy for the future.After all, 2005’s Resident Evil 4 has been ported to every conceivable system since it was released, and the company has recently established Capcom Fighting Collection, a compilation of all its classic fighting games through the years. The latest one of these, subtitled Arcade Classics, focuses on some of my favorite titles like Marvel vs. Capcom games, but it’s also got older gems that I’m grateful to have any access to at all, which feels like the greater point of preservation efforts like this.

The Arcade Classics compilation—which comes with X-Men vs. Street Fighter, X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, MvC2, and The Punisher—boasts everything one might come to expect from such packages. Every game feels pretty close to their arcade equivalents,, though they obviously pop a bit more on modern screens capable of higher fidelity.

Modern classics

There are various small settings that can be tweaked/optimized in the Arcade Classics compilation, like the difficulty of your AI opponents, the base speed of the game, and even the starting stage on some occasions. Additionally, training mode can be entered from the game select screen, or when waiting for an online lobby, and showcases all the frame data one could possibly need, as well as a log of inputs.

In action, controls are pretty simplified and each fighting game has a single button, often on the left trigger, which lets you unleash hyper combos easily, kind of like modern controls in Street Fighter 6. This setting can be toggled in offline and casual play, and cannot be used in ranked, making mastery of the game less intimidating for novices while refraining from stepping on the toes of competitive players.. Speaking of, the fighting games also come with casual and ranked online matchmaking, though I had difficulty finding anyone to play online with during my preview period due to low player count. To complement the preservation and further propagation of these legendary titles, Capcom has even thrown in some very neat behind-the-scenes features.

For example, you can view the marquee of every title almost all the time from the menu, which displays the instructions that would’ve been printed onto the actual arcade cabinet, complete with the original diagrams of the joystick and face buttons that come with them. It’s a handy tool tip to have right in the menu, but for the most part it feels like a piece of history you get to carry with you, which extends to a ton of other features here, too. You can freely dip into a museum mode that features concept art and hundreds of music tracks across the seven games, like MvC2’s iconic character select song, individual character themes, as well as opening and ending songs, and you can even skim through all of it while waiting to connect to an online match. The most exciting bit is the scanned design documents that show some of the developer’s processes when making the games—considering how much is done digitally these days, and how secretive the games industry is, it’s astonishing to see handwritten-and-drawn notes and diagrams that lay out the mechanics and layout of the levels of some of these games, like a sequence on a moving vehicle in the port of The Punisher that remained mostly intact from its accompanying design doc.

An oldie gets its time in the spotlight

On that note, The Punisher is the significant outlier of the collection, since it isn’t a traditional fighting game like the other titles included. Instead, it’s a 2D beat-em-up and its presence here is a pretty big deal: The Punisher is a beloved classic game that never quite made a successful jump to consoles. There is a Sega Genesis port that is widely believed to be inferior to the original arcade version, which has finally now been faithfully ported for the first time ever in this collection .It is also the first game collaboration between Capcom and Marvel Comics, which eventually gave us the rest of the games in this collection (namely the acclaimed Marvel vs. Capcom series), so it’s a significant piece of gaming history, too. And it rips.

I don’t tend to play beat-em-ups (which are deceptively difficult games) often, but after playing through The Punisher, I can understand the hype behind it. The aesthetic of these arcade games has always felt much more in line with the original visions and interpretations of the comic book characters upon which they’re based, and The Punisher certainly has that going for itself. If you were looking for something that looked and felt like a Punisher comic, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better adaptation. Frank Castle looks like the version of him featured in early comics, and he and the game are as gratuitously violent as ever in alignment with their vision. As you wield axes and knives to cut down enemies, it’s refreshing to see them actually bleed, which is otherwise absent from most other beat-em-ups I played growing up, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, but feels tonally pitch perfect here.

In terms of controls, The Punisher is pretty straightforward, but it also has some features that were advanced for its time. For example, Frank and Nick Fury (who’s the second playable character in co-op) don’t quite have a dash, but they do have a directional dodge roll that works along the X-and-Y axis. Upon grabbing an enemy, you can do any one of about three different techniques depending on your inputs, and they each can pick up screen-clearing grenades that saved my life on more than one occasion. When I felt backed into a corner, I could do a spinning leg sweep that worked as an effective parry and doubled as armor for a few seconds. The most stylistic addition comes by way of The Punisher’s firearms, which are only drawn when enemies with guns appear onstage. In these moments, The Punisher automatically locks onto enemies in your vision and lets you unload on them as the game transforms into a shooting gallery, and most of the action is accompanied by comic-accurate onomatopoeias.

I came away from this collection in awe of the historicity of it all and the bang-up job Capcom’s done preserving these seven titles. And I think that’s the ultimate goal of a project like the Capcom Fighting Collection, right? Yes, I’m obviously going to get mileage out of whooping people and being whooped in return as I take my fights online across the fighting game catalog featured here, but I’ve come away with something new and special and I now get to hold onto it in perpetuity. And now games like The Punisher get to live on outside of someone’s faint memories of playing it more than 30 years ago at an arcade. Now, someone who grew up playing and loving that game and others like it can feasibly share it with someone they love. That ought to be true for more games, and hopefully efforts like this Arcade Classics collection help ensure that eventually comes to pass.