1996 saw the release of X-Men Vs. Street Fighter in arcades. I'm really not sure where the idea came from to have a cross-over between the two franchises, but they did it anyway. The main gimmick with this one was that you got to select two fighters to create a tag team, from a selection of 17 characters. Whilst the game-play was still one on one, you could swap between characters easily and there were some other new features, such as the tag super combos and tag counters.

The game is decent, but it comes across as being quickly put together. Almost all of the Street Fighter characters are using their sprites from Street Fighter Alpha 2, just with some more OTT special moves. The X-Men cast is mostly taken from Children of the Atom. There are only 4 truly new playable characters in this: Cammy, Rogue, Gambit and Sabretooth. The previous games had some fantastic backgrounds, but the ones in this are really dull -a near empty shopping mall, a near empty TV studio, a canyon etc. The music for the X-Men characters is also really disappointing, with themes that don't come close to matching the quality from the previous games.

Then there are the infinite combos. Clearly X-Men Vs. Street Fighter wasn't tested enough, as most versions of it are badly broken. There are lots of infinite combos in the game, but the truth is a lot of players love it for that reason -who's going to be the one to get their infinite in first?

Despite these faults the game was still an absolutely huge success in the arcades, which was just what Capcom needed. Home console versions followed a year later but the Playstation version wasn't very good, whilst the SEGA Saturn version was only released in Japan. We can only hope that one day Capcom manage to get it re-released on modern consoles.