Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium Review (Switch eShop)

re: online--well, gotta make the other capcom collections worth it somehow I guess

If the scanlines are still not scaled correctly like in Arcade Stadium 1 I'm not interested. Kudos to the reviewer for pointing this out.

What's the free game that comes with the download?

And why did they make this a separate release and not just add these to the first Capcom Stadium?

Love that Capcom is pushing to get these on modern consoles. Switch is my portable arcade.

The two megaman games are something I've been wanting for awhile.

I'll probably get the two Mega Man games and call it a day with this. Unless something else interests me.

I agree with the sentiment that all of this should be more content/DLC for the first Capcom Arcade Stadium.

I like that I can still buy the games individually, since I have a number of these in Capcom's other compilations.

Like others have said, I wish this was just additional content for the other one. Oh well.

I’m in for the Mega Man games and probably not much else.

Gonna be that guy, but there are too many sf games. I feel sfa/sfa2 isnt necessary, when sfa3 is there. Same with the other sf, ssfte is enough*. That could've been 3 other games in the collection.

*how many sf games are there, if you count each and every edition, for every iteration.

Love Speed Rumbler, but man, is it hard. I liek that you can slow these down which makes them much easier

I got a code for this somewhere in my emails after getting the Capcom Fighting Collection by the looks of it. So yeah. Insta-download.

Three Wonders is available for free with the purchase of Capcom Fighting Collection.

I believe this will only work until the release date of Arcade 2nd Stadium. (21st?) So yeah intended as a preorder (and early purchase) bonus.

Happens to be one of my most nostalgia inducing arcade games ever, so thought this deserved a mention.

What’s the price per game? Is it the same as the first collection?

@Fizza Did you see my comment about Fighting Collection? Sounds like you want it anyway, so might want to pick it up soon for a nice bonus game. (Set of 3 actually.)

FYI, the original Arcade Stadium has all the individual games on sale for $0.99 each.

For Fighting Collection owners it's probably best to buy any titles of interest separately. Though at $4 each they are twice the cost of games in the first Arcade Stadium.

@DoomTurtle

Son Son is the free game.

Is this my browser or are the names of the screenshots not mentioned? I see the docked or handgeld bit but I care more about the name of that jungle themed shooter with the monsters/aliens. I’ve googled half of the other titles now.

As certain a purchase as a purchase can be certain. Loved the first one. I have spent upwards of 40 hours playing it and still feel like I haven't played it enough. I'm fine with this being a separate release, the 2 icons will look good next to each other in my Arcade folder.

While I'm dreaming, I'd love to see a port of their Willow arcade game based upon the 80s film. The art style was a hoot

Don't think there's anything on here I don't already own somewhere else, besides Saturday Night Slam Masters, which is unfortunate. Might just get it to have these games on a portable. At least my favs, Black Tiger, Eco Fighters, Magic Sword.

@sleepinglion Always wanted to play the Willow arcade game. I love that movie.

Still odd how they couldn't just combine this with the first one but it's a nice collection of games, having easy access to Saturday Night Slam Masters, the three Darkstalkers games, the two Mega Man arcade games, Street Fighter Alpha 2 & 3, Pocket Fighter, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo made this one worth it if you care not for rollback netcode. Having 32 titles for just $40 is a great deal too, that's literally $1.25 per game, best value than their physical collections with the only drawback being that you don't get online play.

Saturday Night Slam Masters is a must buy. No online play sucks but I knew that was coming.

@PhhhCough I'd agree about Alpha but not Aloha 2. Alpha 2 and 3 are completely different games. A2 still has single button throws; A3 added two button throws and the Ism system which creates 3 versions of each character. Alpha is a rushed mess of a game and could be eliminated.

There are a lot of appealing titles in there for me, but I'll hold out till either a physical release (yeah right) or a big discount. I finally caved and bought the Stadium 1 bundle just last month, and it's been a treat.

It’s a pretty disappointing selection of games for me. There’s plenty of CPS-1 stuff not represented. I know there’s licensing issues but really they’re the only games left that I’d want to play. While it’s not as convenient as the Switch I can at least still play these games on my CPS-1 multi board.

There should be a third Arcade stadium consisting of all the remaining arcade games from 80s and early 90s yet to appear in the first or second stadium, even if they have already appeared in another collection - excluding the licensed games of course. Include some of the 3D games from the late 90s and early 2000s as well.

I would also claim that Street Fighter 1 was the best one-on-one fighting game of the 1980s. It was clunky to play, but they all were back then. Graphics were great though and still look decent today for a game from 1987.

@Rambler Speed Rumbler. I'm just judging by the reaction from one of the streamers I watched. They are used to use savestates as a practice tool before attempting to do proper 1CC runs.
And he's used to spending hours retrying do so said runs.
He's finishing what is getting close to 500 games by that method.
But Speed Rumbler just got to him by like the second or third level on the 1CC attempts. And was one of those he just had to drop out of. GunForce 2 is the other game I think he's done that on.

But maybe it's more enjoyable without worrying about credits used.

What I hear, the thing about Hahokens in SF1 is that the input is pretty tough. You'd have to practice to make it "easily beaten".
And also, Ken only appears if you're playing a human opponent.
I think in single player, you have to play as Ryu.

@OldManHermit Because it's not obtainable unless one shells out thousands for a used cabinet, it's one to check out any way you can. I want to throw money at a digital release. But it's unlikely. So many fantastic licensed titles are just kind of lost

It's a good thing the invincibility DLC is free this time around. It cost 99 cents in the first Capcom Arcade Stadium, yet it was still worth it.

If you get the timing right, you can mash the Shoryuken command in SF1 over and over and it will sometimes keep working, allowing you to overwhelm your opponent- even Sagat.

@KingMike In Street Fighter 1, you can't pick Ryu and Ken freely. You will become either Ryu or Ken depending on what player side you're on. If you're on the player 1 side then you're Ryu, if you're on the player 2 side then you're Ken. It works just like in the Mario Bros. arcade game in that player 1 side is always Mario while player 2 side is always Luigi. It doesn't really matter though since in SF1 they play the same way anyways. In the very early version of SF1, if you play as Ken then Adon is the final boss instead of Sagat which make sense in the later SF games and Ryu will always fight Sagat as the final boss instead of Adon. This was change in the final version so that you get to fight both bosses with Sagat being the final one.

@Tasuki But it was released as a collection on the PS3. If the license for Dungeons & Dragons were to have expired it would have been long before that.

@BulkSlash Reason for not many CPS games available was due to Capcom choosing the lineup from different generations of their arcade games, some are from the mid to late 80s, early 90s, mid 90s, late 90s, and early 2000s. They did the same with the first collection too, this is just them releasing more titles from those same gens again. If your favorites aren't here yet, chances are they may come in a later third or future Capcom Arcade Stadia collection.

I just feel the need to ask why they're putting games that they've already put on other collections on here. Plus, if they feel the need to fulfill certain quotas, they could at least so something interesting while doing it. They managed to pull it off for Street Fighter 2, so why not do the same for the Alphas if they feel the need to include them? They could easily have included the CPS-1 version of Alpha 1, Alpha 2 Gold instead of base Alpha 2, and while I'd prefer Alpha 3 Upper to base Alpha 3, I'd have been fine with base Alpha 3 (if we'd gotten Alpha 2 Gold), since Capcom seems to want to stick to in-house cabinets for these. For the rest, while I don't know enough about Capcom's arcade history to be able to give a definitive answer on what to do differently, I'm sure they could have figured it out. Now, I just sit and hope for a Volume 3 that gets us the stuff that was for 3rd party cabinets (mainly the Naiomi and PS1 based ones, but I'd also love to somehow see Slipstream and Street Fighter II the Movie the Game show up on there.). While they're at it, maybe they could include the last few scraps that we never got of their non-liscensed in house library while they're at it. A man can dream, I guess.

@KingMike

Also the game was released on the TG16 CD (I think CD).

Awful game for sure but interesting comparing it to SF2 and the massive changes that one brought.

Just foung out it's being released physically. PlayAsia are taking preorders.

We're still missing Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, no?

@Tokujo Holy crap that's even better, hopefully they do it for the first volume too. I may get both physically if both collections got physical treatment not that I'm a game collector or hoarder but these are physical value package that needs to be preserve.

@mrjingles75 Okay, so from what I understand about aspect ratios, what Capcom is doing is a tradeoff. In order to make the games playable full screen, they need to be altered from their original aspect ratio. Meaning that the scan lines are merely decorative, and there is no way around this.

Here is some evidence to back up my claims. Arcade Archive game screen size csn be fully adjusted, the scan lines are artificial. Nintendo Switch Online presents games in full screen. The scan lines are artificial. Konami DOES NOT allow games to display in full screen on their retro collections. The games allow for real scan lines to be produced.
I don't think there is any around this, but I do prefer being able to play the games full screen without scan lines.
Watch, Konami will do the same thing with the Cowabunga Collection. No full screen option, but genuine scan lines options.

@Serpenterror I can't say for sure, but I thought SF1 didn't even let you play a single-player game on the 2P side.
Could be a region/variant difference (I know there were at least two versions of the game. One with 2 pressure-sensitive buttons, and then another with the now standard six-button control system, after reports that people were, perhaps unsurprisingly, breaking the original arcade machines by hitting the buttons too hard.)

I know that Darius 1 means it when it says ONLY PUSH 1 PLAYER BUTTON on the Japanese version, but allows playing as the 2P character on the international versions (though the Cosmic Collection uses the Japanese ROM sets for that game).

@sword_9mm Yes, it was one of, if not the first, CD game.
Though the win screen sound had to be changed to separately play the music and WHAT STRENGTH! DON'T FORGET THERE ARE GUYS LIKE YOU ALL OVER THE WORLD!

It's been mentioned that at one point they thought about making a NES port as well.
(although it would have been interesting just to see if anything would have changed. Very early on, Capcom had a strategy of adding new content to home versions, if not making new games entirely.)

@KingMike It won't but if you beat the other guy as Ken then you could play with Ken all the way. Only thing is he is only available on the player 2 side in SF1.

Honestly, this should have been DLC for the first game.

@Sinton That's because it's a licensed game, based on a comic book series, that spawned a TV Show on CBS. We probably won't see the Willow Arcade Game, either.

@YoshiAngemon Wasn't aware that it was a licensed game. That explains it, though.

@thinkhector I was thinking that because they have embedded MAME into the RE ENGINE they could apply a scanline overlay that's completely independent of the emulation rendering. So whatever scaling adjustments they have made to run MAME full screen wouldn't matter. The display filter that simulates CRT curvature is an example of them already using this capability.

At least one of the Alpha games should have made it into Fighting Collection; feel a bit burned there, considering there are 3 in this digital collection.
So Mega Man and Alpha for me only, thanks…

if the screen filters are the same as the first one, which I assume they are, they're actually brilliant and are only outdone by the ones on Gley Lancer. Maybe you didn't set them up correctly.

@YANDMAN They’re far from brilliant, they’re fairly bad and I detailed why in the review.

@thinkhector The problem is fairly complex. You’re right, the scanlines are set to respond to “normal” which is a full vertical 4:3 approximation. The problem is they’re blown out with far too much bloom effect, desaturating the image and making it uncomfortable to look at. In “arcade”, the true aspect ratio, they’re banded and unusable.

The main issue is when you compare them to Capcom Fighting Collection, which was rocking some of the best screen filters we’ve ever seen in a retro game/collection, in any given aspect ratio.

@Sinton No Cadillacs, and that may be due to licensing issues with the comic/cartoon.

@NeonPizza Once a game costs as much as (the English version) does, it's hard for a game to not be overhyped.
I own the Game Boy games, mostly the English versions, but I went for a Japanese copy of the final game, as there was even then a big price difference.
At that point, I was glad that was the one game of the lot I didn't own as a kid or I might've had nostalgia for the overpriced version.

sad that I have to wait another week to play these games…thanks for the review

@NeonPizza well, when the other 4 are inherently not too original and half of them suck, its kind of expected the most balanced and at least attempting to do something new will get blown up

i wouldnt put it in my top 5 or anything but i thought it was pretty solid

@idork99 You’re very welcome. Thank you for reading.

@mrjingles75 You know what game does really good fake scanlines: "Sonic MANIA". To be fair, they are not even really using lines, but the feel and look of it is a real good approximation. It's funny cause Sonic MANIA is a new games, it never was designed with scanlines.

We're never going to get to see Alien versus Predator are we?

I'm somewhat surprised that, in 30+ years since Street Fighter II first came to prominence, that Capcom never tried to go back and "fix" the original Street Fighter. If the gameplay was a little faster and the controls a little (or a lot) tighter, the game would have been absolutely mind-blowing for 1987. The game was revolutionary in many ways and, with the benefit of hindsight, hugely influential, but the poor performance makes it such a chore to play.

@Tokujo It looks like Play-Asia had delisted the physical version of Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium. I went to their website today and it's nowhere to be found. My guess is that they are planning to release it but Capcom told them to wait until after the digital version release first. I assume Capcom wanted sales from the digital version before selling the physical one. Not sure when it'll get relist again.

I’m glad the Alpha games are getting love from Capcom. Also, Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge… Capcom still has to rerelease that OVA one day.

I wish Capcom could get a licensed classics collection out for both D&D arcade games, U.N. Squadron/Area 88, Willow, Aliens vs. Predator, and Punisher w/ Nick Fury.

@PofH1 And the Marvel games, we could hope since the Capcom version of Aladdin did make it.

@Serpenterror oh hell yes, that would be awesome

@thinkhector i'd be happy with that too. I found that if I set the display size to 'Arcade' the horizontal scanline options work correctly. This shrinks the rendered area some 20% so it's a deal breaker undocked but at least it's an option for docked play. I contacted Capcom about this issue directly and was told it was the 'intention' of the developers to have scanlines implemented this way. Hmm. There must be different developers on this to other Capcom compilations because the Belt Action Collection has working scalines.

@CharlieGirl better just buy the whole package at $39.99 because a single game cost $3.90, and there is total 30 games.

@PofH1 they already got licensed for aliens vs predators, it is available on the arcade stick collection or whatever it is called. Can’t understand why they refused to make it available here.

I'm buying this for Darkstalkers on its own. I'll play the other games. They're mostly great games. With a couple of meme games like Street Fighter 1. But I've wanted to play Darkstalkers for ages and MAME is a mess that I simply cannot work out how to make it work, some games just flat out do not work unless you spend hours installing extra ***** and moving folders around and renaming them because mame is so bad that you can't like choose a folder to load games from, you get one folder and it's the only folder allowed to be used, you can't seem to set it to any folder you want. Mame needs fixing

So yeah having the arcade version of Darkstalkers to play? Hell yeah man of course I'll buy it. It's a bargain considering all the games involved

@somebread It's worse than that. Capcom Stadium 1 and 2 are both online! They are constantly updated with weekly challenges and such. It seems it would have been easy to make online multiplayer work.

@mrjingles75 None of the scanlines in any of the retro collections, including Arcade Archive games are correct. Basically, if the game runs full screen, it doesn't have proper scanlines, but are emulated. Konami Contra end Castlevania games don't run full screen and so have proper scanlines. You can't have both. (I mean you could, but you would need to separate rom files each with their own saves.) It's really a question of how good the fake scanlines are. Sonic Mania has the best fake scanlines I've seen, (it doesn't even use 'lines' but dots to achieve a replica effect.) Capcom could have done a better job with their scanlines, but they still would be authentic, just improved.

My favorite thing about these games isn't highlighted. Arcade games have a weird distinction of being both hard and easy. As long as you keep putting in 'quarters', you can beat the games easy, and you can clear them without continues if you want with the rewind feature.
Ah, but this where Score Challenge mode comes in. Say good bye to rewind, and you only get one quarter, no continues. Well where is the fun in dying quickly? Well you get system points for how far you get before you die. You might not ever beat the game on one quarter, but the system keeping track of your progress makes you at least want to try and see how good you can get. It's a really nice feature.

@thinkhector I was wrong about the scanlines working when the display mode is set to Arcade screen size. In Arcade Stadium all the horizontal scanline options are well and truly buggered in both Normal and Arcade modes. I'm ok with fake scanlines and love the way M2 have them working in the Konami collections. Haven't seen Sonic but I'm sure you're right so it shouldn't be a big ask for Capcom. Hoping they eventually listen to the feedback and improve them.

@mrjingles75 The ones in the Konami Collection aren't really fake though. When you add scanlines it (roughly) doubles the size of the image. So if a game starts at full screen and you try to do real scanlines the games picture is gonna be way off the screen. The best way (to me) is to just go full screen and use a filter of some sort. That's what most companies do, but the quality of the filters varies.

Have to say that I was disappointed by the line-up announcement.
I bought it and prefer the original CAS.
No Mars Matrix? No Dimahoo?
Given Capcom's current fondness for overlaps, maybe we'll see a Capcom Shooting Collection?

@thinkhector using the RE engine should give them tons of capability to do just what you described. They can overlay whatever they want at a resolution independent of what the game is displayed at. I guess it comes down to a lack of interest on their part. I bet the dev team for Arcade Stadium consists of 2 interns working from a tiny windowless room in Capcom's basement.

@MrGrim That sucks.