Category Archives: Capcom

How Ace Attorney does so much with so little

We live in an age where, at the upper end of the market, video game budgets are spiralling out of control in a relentless pursuit of movie-like photorealism.

And yet, a series of games that first appeared just under 25 years ago (at the time of writing) has pretty consistently been doing such a great job of telling its stories with minimal tech that its publisher, Capcom, still regards it as one of its most valuable intellectual properties.

I am, of course, talking about the Ace Attorney series, and I thought it might be fun to look at some aspects of how these games present their stories to the audience — something that has remained fairly constant over its complete run, despite spanning several hardware generations. So let’s do just that!

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One Piece Mansion: the puzzle of stress management

One Piece Mansion is not a Capcom game I had any familiarity with whatsoever prior to receiving a surprise copy of it from a YouTube viewer a little while back.

I’ve spent a bit of time with it this evening, and there’s definitely some appeal there. It’s an exceedingly peculiar game, to be sure — and I’m all for exceedingly peculiar games at the best of times.

Thankfully One Piece Mansion backs its exceeding peculiarity up with some solid gameplay and original ideas, making it a worthwhile addition to your PlayStation library. Let’s take a closer look!

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Ace Attorney: evolving the Japanese adventure game formula

Playing through the two Famicom Detective Club games got me well and truly in the mood for some more adventuring. And so it was that I finally booted up the Nintendo Switch version of the first Ace Attorney Trilogy that I’ve had on my shelf for quite some time.

I’ve previously played all the Ace Attorney games except for the sixth one (and The Great Ace Attorney, and Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney… and the unlocalised second Ace Attorney Investigations game) so I already know the series quite well, but it’s been a good few years since I sat down and gave them some proper attention.

Moreover, I’ve somehow gone this long without ever writing about them here on MoeGamer, so today’s the day we fix that. Perhaps not for the last time, either.

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Capcom Essentials: Final Fight

First released in 1989, Capcom’s Final Fight was originally conceived as a sequel to Street Fighter.

The success of Technos and Taito’s Double Dragon in 1987 (and again with its sequel in 1988) convinced Capcom to reimagine the game as a belt-scrolling beat ’em up rather than a one-on-one fighter, however, and that proved to be a solid decision. Street Fighter, meanwhile, would go on to get its true sequel in 1991… and create its own phenomenon in the process.

Final Fight, while perhaps not as well known or fondly regarded as its one-on-one stablemates today, remains a highly enjoyable game — with more depth than you might expect at first glance.

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Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle: It’s The Belt For You, Lad

Those of you who read my coverage on Senran Kagura: Estival Versus will know how much I enjoy the beat ’em up genre… and how much I appreciate its history.

With that in mind, Capcom’s announcement that it would be releasing a new product simply called Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle made me kiss £15.99 goodbye even before the package was released. Doubly so because it was also coming to Switch… and who doesn’t want to bust some heads on the go?

Today we’ll take a high-level look at the package as a whole, then over the course of a series of Capcom Essentials articles in the coming weeks, we’ll explore the individual games in the collection in more detail. Suffice to say for now that £15.99 is a very fair price for this bundle, and I highly recommend it to all fans of the genre.

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