izigame.me

Honestly, as much as being able to play the games in this collection is a dream come true, and regardless of the fact I posted several guides for it as soon as the game came out, I find it difficult to recommend this collection, unless you were in a specific situation like mine, where you spent years watching videos of the games on Youtube and wanting to play them for yourself, but have never had a chance to own the hardware they were released on, and/or have friends to play these with.
In terms of positives, I can praise the fact that the input delay in the games is pretty good for the most part, so you don't have to worry about needing surgical precision to do an uppercut in Street Fighter Alpha 3, for example, and other QOL features such as enabling secret characters and being able to mess around with most game settings beyond difficulty, time and rounds are still there, where applicable. They've also added a reset button, internal resolution enhancer and Versus modes to every game, including the previous two Fighting Collections. While these are welcome additions, they are still features that weren't present until we were 3 collections in, which I find mind boggling.
As for the reasons why I find it hard to recommend this collection:
There isn't much in terms of single player content. Capcom still insists in releasing the Arcade ports only, instead of offering people the option to play the console ports as well. Which, in the case of most games in this collection, had a ton of game modes and other goodies (such as being able to create your own Grooves and a Colour Edit in Capcom VS SNK 2). So after you finish Arcade with every character at least once, beyond playing Versus matches against the CPU, you won't really have much of a reason to come back very often unless you have friends to play with. Specially since the CPU can be a real pain to fight. Sometimes, you'll fight a character that takes a beating without doing anything about it in the early matches, but when you fight them again in a different run they can randomly become an absolute nightmare. These being Capcom developed games, expect CPUs to start blocking everything often in later stages too.
In spite of this, Capcom put arguably double the effort into injecting things from said console ports onto the Arcade roms. Specifically, things like the Versus and Training screens, as well as specific things like Capcom Vs. SNK Pro's Pair Match. The Arcade original, as far as I know, only had Ratio matches.
They also decided to give us the Edit Characters for Project Justice. Now, before you get too excited, no that doesn't mean they added the character creator. You're stuck using the pre-made, generic characters, some of which have nonsencial movesets (such as the guy that doesn't have any special moves, only super moves.) It's specially frustrating in the case of games like Power Stone 2, who by itself is pretty barren, specially since the already simple gameplay from the original was further simplified and there are no Arcade endings.
There are also other issues that cannot go unmentioned:
For some reason, we STILL have to share ONE Quick Save slot across every single game, which is still baffling to me, as several other re-releases of retro games give you individual Save States per game, sometimes with multiple slots per game as well. Some of these collections are several years old too. Not only that, but Capcom somehow managed to make this system worse, by way of making it so it doesn't even function as advertsided: It's not a Save State. It's a CHECKPOINT.
Meaning that regardless of where you save, you will always be booted back to the Versus screen. Except in Capcom Fighting Evolution, which for some reason boots you back to the Victory screen of your previous match. On the topic of that game, somehow, I managed to find the one exception to this rule: I had forgotten to save the game before fighting Pyron, so I did it as the ending sequence began. Out of curiosity, I loaded that quick save and found that the game actually saved there instead of behaving as described above...
Even though Capcom went out of their way to patch Pocket Fighter in the first collection to change one singular word in Dan's ending, they couldn't be bothered to patch the roms in this collection to correct several spelling mistakes and a gramatical error here or there. Which is specially bad in Project Justice's case, since it has a dedicated Story Mode. It doesn't make the story unreadable mind you, it just means you'll run into sentences that are weirdly phrased or with words spelled incorrectly. On a side note, one of Joe's quotes in CVS Pro is incomplete and everything. It reads "My name is Joe, and I AM"
Another thing they somehow messed up is the Training Mode. Normally, you'd expect to have an option where the Dummy gets hit by one attack and guards the rest if it doesn't lead to a combo right? Not in this collection. Across the board, if you fail to do a combo, the Dummy will continue guarding your every attack (even if it resulted in a knockdown), forcing you to either stop for a couple of seconds so the dummy resets, or pressing R3 to reset Training Mode. You're also unable to set your Health and Super Meters to infinite, you only have the auto-recovery option. So if you're planning on practicing your Super Moves, get ready to hear the meter fill up sounds over and over again for the duration of your training session.
As if all of that wasn't enough, the in-game tracker doesn't always work correctly. Since I started playing the collection, I've had several instances where I complete the game with X character, but the tracker doesn't acknowledge it. There was even a case in CVS2 where I completed Arcade with Vice, and the tracker somehow counted a completed run with her, but with ZERO play sessions registered. She's so powerful, she manifested a victory for herself, it seems.
There have also been cases where I complete an achievement, Steam acknowledges it, but the in-game tracker doesn't, forcing me to do it again. On top of that, some of the hints the game displays are either misleading, or outright incorrect, such as Gore and Luca's achievement that asks you to use a special move that makes them tiny. The hint and the move list display two extra inputs that are unnecessary to activate that special move and just make it needlessly harder to use. These issues were not at all present in the previous two collections either, mind you.
While there wasn't anything censored in the games themselves this time as far as I could tell, (apart from Rugal and Sagat not saying the names of their moves, Genocide Cutter and Tiger Genocide respectively in the english versions of CVS PRO and CVS2, which I am unsure whether or not are carry overs from the original), Capcom also randomly decided to censor Mai's CVS2 portrait, by cropping the section that shows her butt. Which is painfully obvious when every other portrait shows the character's body to at least the level of the waist, and Mai's is the only one that's square shaped and so zoomed in you can even see tiny coloured spots in some of her line art (similarly to when old animated movies are re-released and the definition of the cels is tripled, resulting in you seeing things you normally wouldn't be able to). Which is a hypocritical thing to do when Capcom has zero qualms with parading Mai's (and other characters) sizeable assets in Street Fighter 6, and one of the promotional illustrations missing from CVS Pro's gallery is also parodied in the aforementioned game, just replacing Chun-li with Juri.
Overall, most of the games in this collection are fun, even 20+ years later, and I am glad to see them come back with good netcode with QOL improvements and other modern novelties we've come to expect, but with all the issues I mentioned above... Wait for a big discount if you plan on buying this.