The Total Recall
DUD OF THE MONTH
COLLECTION!

Videogames101's
Dud of the Year

CAPCOM
FIGHTING
EVOLUTION

Artist touch: I will give Capcom credit for hiring some talented artists here. Each fighter has fantastic detail with a good deal of light and shadow. Although the 6 characters seemed too crammed in the tiny space, they're all from their respective games which can help the gamers know just what they are getting here. Cover Art rating: 8/10

Month it won: February 2005

(Capcom, November 4, 2004)

Special note: There is nothing unique or special about this game! You can play as characters from Red Earth like a giant dinosaur but it isn't as cool as it sounds.

Introduction and Story:

Controls and Game Play:

So what type of characters do you get to play here? The five games CFE represents are Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter III (see a pattern here), Dark Stalkers, and there are characters from arcade super flop Red Earth. Before you get too excited about the line up here you only get 4 fighters from each game so many of your old favourites like Blanka, Elena, Ken, Birdie, and so many more are sitting this one out. In fact CFE only has one exclusive fighter added to the line up (Ingrid) but this cute yet very lame young chick is just like every generic school girl you played in many other fighting games out there.

The main reason I think some gamers go back to all these old fashion 2D fighting games is because they may prefer the simpler and user friendly controls to the newer 3D ones. Sadly even Capcom even managed to screw that up as well. The controls can be way too sensitive at times and I often found myself performing the wrong moves during a heated contest. CFE also has a problem with unbalanced characters (guys like Zangief and Anakaris can be very cheap for example) so it can only takes a few seconds to lose lots of health fast.

Graphics and Sounds:

Other then the one new girl, all the characters are recycled from the past games. When I mean recycled from the past games I don't mean the fighters were redrawn to utilize the power of the PS2, I mean they look exactly the same as they appeared in their older games. These characters with still look fairly decent in a creative sort of way but this isn't the 16-bit generation anymore and these 2D sprites on flat non-interactive backgrounds just don't cut it in this day and age. The music and the sound effects are nothing special either since they too sound like they were lifted from old games.

The Bottomline:

This game should have been the game that would reinvent 2D fighting games since Capcom is the innovator of this genre but instead it showed why these games should stay dead and buried. There is absolutely nothing new here because not only are the graphics and sound are horribly out dated, but the game also has no new moves or techniques either. CFE is kind of like the evolution of a toilet. The newer toilet may look real fancy at first but it is still only good for holding your crap! Capcom Fighting Evolution is so bad that it is easily one of the worse games I played in 2004.