You can tell a lot about how highly regarded the PSOne is these days by the fact that EUROPE is getting games for it before the US does - a three week gap in this case. Lucky us.

Costing just £20 ($30) - CvS Pro is a port of that terminally unexciting CvS upgrade released in Japanese arcades and on the Dreamcast in June 2001, that featured tweaked visuals, plenty of game alterations and the introduction of Joe Higashi and Dan Hibiki. Everything is pretty much as you’d expect - a watered-down, smaller, slower port of a game that was pretty small, slow and watered-down to begin with. It retains the essence of the arcade/Dreamcast version, just about, so expect me to say something about recommending it, but only if you have no access to the arcade or Dreamcast versions, or the far-superior CvS2 in the final paragraph. Yar.

Obviously it would be foolish to expect anything near arcade perfection, and of course it falls far short. Still, it’s interesting to see which areas it fails the most in and which it manages to pull off.

Upon loading the game, the player is first greeted with the incredibly stupid memory card manager, and then a rather grubby FMV version of the CvS:Pro intro (shades of SFA1 and 2 on the PSX here.) Later on in the game the player will notice the three ending sequences plus, amusingly, the credits are all video clips as well. Past this and we’re onto the main menu. It’s funny how for years now I’ve been taking things like anti-aliasing, 3D effects and unlimited colour palettes for granted - but they’re noticeably absent here - the rotating background to the menu screen is ugly and jerky, as are the menus themselves. The cool ‘flying through a tunnel’ effect on the character select screen is gone, replaced with a square colour-cycling “tunnel effect”. The character avatars lack colour and badly need edge-trimming and the huge pink VS that pops up after the selection is just horrible. The full-screen character images that accompanied the order select screen are gone, and overall it totally lacks the brightness, smoothness and style of the DC version.

The game itself fares somewhat better. The sprites are full size and are fully detailed. The animation has been reduced, more on some characters than others (Rugal’s cool stand pose is now just a handful of frames, the same with Mai and Kyo, though Terry is as smooth as the other versions) - and most characters now have only one win pose, but it’s in no way a travesty, and is actually pretty impressive when you consider the age and 2D limitations of the console. Even the special character intros are still present, though they too are somewhat lacking in animation. There are cuts present in the special effects all over the place - the super combo finish effect is now three lines spinning around instead of the huge pink and orange explosion and large conflagrations like Kyo’s Orochinagi or Terry’s English mangling BUSTER WOLF look totally out of place, pixelly and jerky. Even little things like hit/block sparks and projectiles have been cut back in terms of detail and smoothness, no longer glowing - they’re pixelly, jagged shadows of their former selves. And the ‘enflamed’ player sprite is just utterly appalling.

In some ways these problems are reminiscent of the PSX-to-Saturn ports of yore (first time ‘yore’ has been used on this site!) - the slowdown, the simplification and reduction of special effects, it’s a given the Dreamcast is way more powerful than the PlayStation, but it’s almost interesting to see exactly which areas are affected by this gap in power.

The slowdown I mentioned is a pretty frequent occurrence, too. Any big explosions, any enflamed effects, certain projectiles, even two big characters both doing certain moves can make it jerk a little. It’s never enough to put me off - nothing more than a minor annoyance — and I have to say I actually like it when it happens during a super combo finish - it makes the final blow all the more dramatic.

There have been further reductions to keep the game playable and load time minimal - the superb stage intro animations have been removed entirely, the levels themselves all have reduced colour, detail and resolution, and a lot of the atmospheric effects - the rain in the Osaka street stage - and the sliding arcade door, the shadows in the background of the Final Fight street, the halos of light on the player sprites at the car crash scene, the fighter data display in Bison’s lair, the water splashes in Akuma’s stage and most likely more have been taken out. Also the HUD, the meters and portraits and combo meter, are all smaller, squarer and less interesting-looking.

Load times are frequent and noticeable, but never extreme. There’s a full-screen piece of the official CvS character artwork (ugh) between each fight, and about a 15 second wait. One clever and very welcome feature is the option the game gives you to skip the win/next fight/order select screens and just progress directly to the next match after winning. As you KO your last opponent, the words ‘press start’ appear under the super meter at the bottom of the screen - doing so totally omits the aforementioned screens, and thus the load times they entail - and goes straight into loading the next fight. You forfeit the option to change your character order, but it’s a small price to pay. In total, I’ve seen the win screen once since I began playing the game.

The music is identical in quality and quantity - though winning a fight no longer instantly heralds the ’shake well before serving’ victory theme, the ‘final round’ and ‘hurry up’ tunes are still there, along with most of the speech samples, though at a noticeably lower sample rate.

So overall it’s a reduced, slightly ugly and senile old port of a game, understandably so, and while it lacks the gloss and shine of it’s sibling, the core of the game - the engine, the game mechanics, characters and combat are totally intact, and while I’m far from the worlds’ greatest Capcom vs. SNK Pro fan, preferring the more developed, varied and expansive thrills of the sequel, or indeed Capcom/SNK’s separate efforts - it’s still a slick, playable and satisfying fighter, and though I’m using an ASCII stick, the 4-button control method is ideal for the standard PlayStation controller. I noticed the difficulty has been slightly upped - there were times on the PSX version where I was playing with 10 GPS and I even got down to 0 once (!) … yet I stuck the DC version in just now and sailed through with 60-80 the whole way through. Both were on level 8, so that’s something worth checking out, but don’t expect a challenge or anything.

While the game plays fine (or, as fine as CvS can) - there is a shadow hanging over its lastability. Unlike DC CvSPRO, which came with all secret options, characters and modes unlocked - the PSX version requires you to earn them, as you had to in the original DC CvS. However while there were complaints about the excessive length of time it took to unlock everything in the Dreamcast game, Capcom seem to have taken things too far in the opposite direction here - and every secret can be unlocked in the PlayStation version in three hours or so. Playing the game earns points, using the training mode earns points, and even playing really badly will score you around 400 points for one complete playthough (takes about 10-15 minutes). Now the EX versions of the characters (one of my biggest hates about CvS1) cost 50 points each to buy, and the five secret characters; Morrigan, queen of VGA resolutions, Nakoruru the unspellable, and overpowered cocks Evil Ryu, Akuma and Orochi Iori - cost 300 points each. Work it out, you only need to beat the game about seven or eight times to have enough points to buy everything. And then what? You can check out the poor character art collection in the “GALLARY” (!!) mode, mess around in training, pick two characters of any ratio and use them in Pair Match mode, edit colour schemes, and that’s it really. Having played both CvS and CvS Pro already, this version offers nothing that can’t be gotten bigger and better elsewhere.

I guess it could be thought of as a goodwill gesture to those folks out there too poor, too stupid or too set in their ways to buy a new console - and I’m sure that they do exist, and as such won’t have had the chance to play the game until now, so in that respect it’s an admirable decision, and it warms the heart to see that such an ancient console can churn out a respectable version of a NAOMI-powered arcade game if it’s pushed far enough.

But like I said at the start and like I said I’d say at the end - there’s really no reason to buy this. Capcom vs SNK 2 is out for Dreamcast and PS2 and is a far better game, both CvS and CvS Pro are available on the Dreamcast, and if you have any interest in fighting games it’s pretty much a given you’ll own one or both of these consoles already.

Despite it’s pointlessness in the grand scheme of things, it’s still an impressive piece of coding and at such a cheap price it’s hard to badmouth such a valiant effort. It’s like the Brave Little Toaster that tried, but couldn’t. But with fireballs.

It’s also given me a new-found respect for the game, which I’ve been playing every day for the past week or so now. On the Dreamcast.

• Publisher/Developer: Capcom
• Score: 80%