Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

What is it?

It’s a fighting game, silly! In the tradition of Marvel vs. Capcom, SNK vs. Capcom, and perhaps even Aliens vs. Predator comes Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, a Wii-exclusive port of an arcade fighter that features a medium-sized roster of characters both from some of Capcom’s best-known games and Japanese anime publisher Tatsunoko. On the Capcom side you’ve got a small assortment of characters from the Mega Man games, Dead Rising, Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Viewtiful Joe, Lost Planet and more. On the Tatsunoko side, there are some folks from Battle of the Planets (which apparently some people think is called G-Force) and a pile of other characters that I can all but guarantee you’ve never heard of if you’re not Japanese.

How’s it look and sound?

The characters are not sprites, rather they’re nice clean 3D models who do battle in a 2D space. These are elaborate and fancy things, with lots of flashes and shiny effects. Despite this, everything has a very crisp anime style, and the tight design and smooth animation looks beautiful on a big widescreen display. This is a game that has to be seen in motion to be believed. Several times while playing the game I was stunned by just how good it looks. I saw no slowdown, no graphical glitches… nothing. Over time, I’ve become increasingly annoyed with some of the lazy visual efforts we’ve seen on Nintendo’s platform, even from Nintendo themselves, but there is nothing about the visuals in this game that feels like anything less than a AAA title.

A lack of surround sound is a minor disappointment. With the sound cranked up, the combination of the electronic music, the screams and shouts of the characters, and the clashing of bodies and weapons is just shy of chaos. The audio presentation really adds to the experience a great deal, and one wonders just what it could have been like with a room full of surround sound thrown in as well. Voices need to be mentioned. Characters like Viewtiful Joe who have had US voice talent behind them (Dee Baker, in that case) don’t have their English voices, just Japanese. In Joe’s case, I found this disappointing, especially since Capcom could have just used existing audio clips, either from the 2 PS2/Cube games or the PSP/Cube fighter that he appeared in.

How does it play?

This is the best part. Even when playing online and having my rear end handed to me by another player, I never felt like I’d been cheated. The controls are quick and responsive, and even though I was playing on a Classic Controller and then a Gamecube Controller, I didn’t feel like I needed a fighting stick to compete. Which isn’t to say I won’t eventually get one.

There are assist attacks which call on your tag team partner, though these are clumsy when you’re not using them to chain combos together. There is a fancy “baroque” combo extending system, and a really broad range of contextual modifiers to the moves you can use. Familiar characters like Viewtiful Joe, Ryu and Chun Li all have moves you’ll recognize from their games, as well as a host of new ones thrown on top. If you’re just learning, you can have the game overlay a map of the moves toward the top of the screen while you’re playing. I didn’t find that very helpful as I couldn’t focus on that and the fight at the same time… but maybe during training.

The beauty of this game, though, is you don’t need any of that. You’ve got four buttons that do different things (light, medium, heavy attacks and then a tag-team button), with modifiers based on where you are and what you’re doing. The learning curve is quick, and I was pulling off elaborate combos fairly quickly, largely by accident.

The newly added online system in this game is easily the most feature-rich I’ve played on Wii. The only thing lacking here is voice chat, which I can hardly blame Capcom for omitting when it barely exists on the platform. I spent some time in Free Play, which pairs you up with anyone (this happened very quickly while I was testing) and tosses you right into the fray after you select a location and a pair of fighters. I lost, but even while I was largely button-mashing, it wasn’t a completely unbalanced affair. Button mashing will only get you so far, and once an experienced opponent is onto you, that’s the end of it. This isn’t a super-technical fighter like Tekken, but neither is it Smash Bros.

Local multiplayer is even better, because of the more social aspect of it. By social, I mean you can shout expletives at the person sitting next to you on the couch. Other modes in the game include an endless survival mode and of course the main arcade mode, which pits you against CPU-driven pairs of enemies until the final three-stage battle against what appears to be the final boss from the Capcom game Okami. Uh, spoiler.

The only nuisance I found in the game is the surprising amount of load times, but this seems to be a pattern with fighting games I’ve played. This is more of a problem in the final arcade mode battle than anywhere else, as there are load times between each of the forms the final boss takes. A friend who’s played the original arcade game says he thinks the load times are in line with what he experienced in the arcade, so make your own judgment there.

How’s the replay value?

You can keep pumping up the difficulty and even adjust the hit damage in the options menu, which potentially gives this title a ton of life in the future. Beyond that, the addition of online play will make a huge difference in longevity, as long as people keep playing it. Either way, I’d suggest building a list of friends you can play with online, because it’s only a matter of time before the people playing it online in random matches with hacked Wii consoles are dominating the leaderboards by cheating. So yeah, it’s a strong replay value, but that always depends on how many people are playing it in the future.

Is it worth it?

Heck yes. This is a rare gem of a Wii title, the kind of thing we want more of on Wii. I could wish the Tatsunoko characters were Marvel instead, or DC for that matter, but they’re all very neat and in a way, they make the experience even more novel. Even if the Battle of the Planets characters think they’re some Gatchaman thing.

I give Tatsunoko vs Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars a 4.5 out of 5. Long time fans of the series might like it even better.