A lil' late as usual, let me rant a bit about SvC... last night I played it on homecart (thanks Dampfwalze!!) for about 3 hrs both vs CPU and 2P and overall, I'm disappointed with the game.
I've tried all characters including the hidden ones, and the first impression was "this is KoF". Almost all combos that you can do in various KoFs are in SvC as well, with some differences in timing and setup because of the dashing and speed differences, but there's nothing you couldn't do in, say, KoF2k1, and vice versa, including super-cancels, etc.
The character lineup is quite okay, tho I could live without Choi and any weapon fighter, I also dislike them in CvS2. The hidden charas are not too bad, I had quite some fun with the Mars People, IMO they did a good job with incorporating this kind of character into a fighter.
On the Capcom side, there's the usual selection of our fave Cap heroes... the presence of three very similar Shotos (Ryu, Ken, Akuma) is a bit much, but whatever. Perhaps this is why they slowed down Ryu so much, compared to Ken and Ryo, he's a lame duck IMO. Must be the age kicking in?! Anyway, Chun, Sagat, Dhalsim and Ken are alive and kicking as ever, if there weren't all these colission problems - fighting with Sagat against a good Dhalsim player feels like watching an educational movie of a software developer that showcases all sorts of sprite colission detection bugs... very weird, and totally inexcusable IMO. No play tester worth his salt should let stuff like this pass the quality check. Projectiles hit where they shouldn't, Sagat's C Tiger Uppercut has a monstrous hit box that also hits an opponent standing behind (!) him... in one round, I was using Takuma against Dhalsim and it felt like fighting against a wobbly piece of jelly... weird.
The two big guys, Earthquake and Hugo, play surprisingly well, tho it's funny to see them in the ring together, there's almost no space left to actually fight....
The engine is not very tight, comboing is quite easy and straight-forward, nothing new here. Anywhere Cancelling reminds me of the crap that is the KoF2k2 BC mode, but the execution in SvC is slightly better and more intuitive, again, nothing special.
Graphics and sound are meh - I like the idea and intentions behind stages like the desolated train station but the actual drawing style feels blunt and the colors seem washed out. It's very obvious if you switch to an older pre-SNKP game inbetween two SvC rounds, makes me want to adjust the color on my TV... The Capcom sprites look good, tho.
And the in-game f/x - man, hitting the block sounds like a raindrop on an empty cardboard box, no punch, no power, very boring. Coupled with the so-so music, the game sounds like a budget mid-90s production. What's up with that? Are they running out of good samples? I don't get it.
Finally, the overall presentation is decent, at least they spared us the charset mixup of KoF2k2 with its lousy fonts and -combinations. The win screens and quotes are not too bad but some character faces look a bit weird, like Balrog's. The chara menu is nice but the timer is annoying.
So, as a resumee, I'd say SvC is a mediocre execution of a long-awaited game that has its moments and initially decent amount of fun, but I fear that the replayability isn't all too great. After three or four hours of SvC I felt that I had to play something else for a change - a trend which led me to the conclusion that I won't buy SvC on homecart at the moment because it's certainly not that stinkin' piece of bug-riddled crap that some make it out to be, but IMO the price of the homecart is too high compared to what I'd get for it - I'll wait for a next-gen console port, thank you.
I agree with kernow: 60% seems like a fair rating.
Oh well, maybe one day! Shin mr.Karate is my favorite character, he's got the moves!
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