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After waiting sooo long I finally witness one of the greatest arcade translations ever! After finding out that almost all the EB guys brought all the copies of it I reserved it at Babbages. After waiting almost two weeks for to come in after the date it was supposed to come in I get a message on the answering machine. The next day I get down to Babbages and pick it up. Then go to EB and get a converter. Now with that done you CAN play X-Men vs. Street Fighter WITHOUT modifing your sega saturn!

The plot of X-Men vs. SF is very generic and overused in most crossovers. Apocalypse crosses over to the SF universe and captures numerous X-Men and Street Fighter. You can see who is captured when you fight him. With this happening Cyclops and the X-Men form an alliance with Ryu and the Street Fighters. Magento and M. Bison and the other bad guys do Apocalypse's bidding for their own reasons. Now on with the review!

GRAPHICS:
What wonders that 4mb ramcart can do. It is a perfect translation of the arcade. There are no missing frames and no glitches. All the moves are very fluid especially kicks and punches. When you do the supers, not the tag-team supers, that close up bar appears over your character. All the characters have only 2 or 3 winning stances which is disappointing because in SFA2 characters had 4 or more. Besides that the are only about 7 stages or so. These are the best 2-D graphics I've ever seen! One of the best translations ever on any system!

MUSIC/SOUND:
What can I say about the music? Most of it is just taken from the X-Men game or the Street Fighter games the only tracks that weren't taken from other games were Sabertooth's, Gambit's, and Rogue's tracks.

The sound of X-Men vs. SF is crystal clear. Unlike other Capcom games the sound is not muffled. This time you can actually hear what they are saying. Also, I would say 95% of the game is in English for some reason unknown. The only parts being Japanese are the endings and the winning quotes.

CONTROL/GAMEPLAY:
As usual the control is almost virtually flawless on the Saturn pad. The controls are very tight and responsive to your command. The only problems being are when you assign 3 kicks or 3 punches to either of the shoulder buttons. Take for example when instead of doing a super you dash towards your opponent and he kills you with his super.

The main reason the Vs. series has gained so much popularity is the tag team option obviously missing in its Playstation counterpart. Even though probably most diehard SF fans think that X-Men Vs. SF has no stragety what so ever and is just flash there is an inkling of stragety involved. When you switch fighters the fighter not being used gets a chance to refill his/her energy bar while the fighter you use fights to buy as much time as possible for his/her partner to recharge. Also, to sustain as little damage as possible to have less recouping time.

The cheapest thing are some of the supers. For the Super Bar the cheap ones are the ones you don't see a comin' or the ones you think are just plain special moves or too powerful. Like Sabertooth's X-Strike which is just too powerful. You think it is his special move which is just one strike but it ends up being the 4 strike one.

The last thing is the lack of difficulty. I beat this game on the hardest difficulty without continuing once! I'm not saying I want the difficult and very annoying AI of the MK series; I just want a challenge when I playing.

REPLAY:
Like all other fighting games this one doesn't last too long playing alone especially since the are no extra playing modes besides versus and arcade. But this all soon changes when a few buddies come over and everybody is arguing over who turn it is. Remember think about this one just don't rush out and buy it on impulse or you might regret it. This game cost over a $100! Read other reviews and see if you find consistent good reviews about this game.

RATINGS:
GRAPHICS:5/5
SOUND:5/5
MUSIC:3/5
CONTROL:4/5
GAMEPLAY:4/5
BALANCE:3/5
INTERACTION:5/5
INNOVATION:3/5
REPLAY:4/5
OVERALL:****