Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Arrrgh

OK, so far we've been relatively nice to 'Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3'. Unfortunately that's going to change. Sadly this was avoidable as a few changes that didn't need to happen happened and a few changes that needed to happen didn't. There are probably going to be a few items on this topic but for today we're going to limit ourselves to rehashing the song and dance crap that goes on after a match online and the new (horrible) character select screen.

So the few long time readers (hahaha) of this blog an article I published a few months ago complaining about the stuff that goes on after every single ranked match. Namely:

1. A (pointless) cut scene of the winning character;
2. The game goes to a Winner/Loser screen and saves;
3. A wholly uninformative (and useless) player card;
4. “Updating player data”, whatever the hell that entails;
5. “Player Points acquired”, w00t, oh wait these points are worthless;
6. Saving...again;

So after all that tedium it is my pleasure to report that absolutely nothing has changed with regards to this. Actually one thing might have changed though this might just be my frustration with this whole process exaggerating things but it feels like the “Updating Player Data” phase might be taking slighting longer in 'Ultimate' than it did in vanilla 'MvC3'. The best part? You can't skip any of this. You can't disable any of it in menus (i.e. if you're like me and couldn't care less about player points). You can't speed this process up at all. The funny thing? All of this is minimized (i.e. skippable) or nonexistent with offline play. Thanks Capcom. A+ job on listening to peoples issues with your product and correcting them.

Now we get to change for changes sake with the character select screen. For reference here's the previous version:

It's compact, it's efficient and if you ignore the crappy music it's perfectly fine.

And here's the new one:

Larger, uglier character portraits and it retains the crappy music.

Blech. It's not so much that the new select screen is worse (which it is) but rather that it's another one of those situations (the new already discussed HUD being another example) where one really questions Capcoms priorities and resource allocation, i.e. why fix what ain't broke when there's still stuff that is broke? A good question to ask and one that I'm left wondering as to what the hell they where thinking. See you all next week.