I just finished watching the Capcom Spotlight livestream, which featured exciting upcoming titles like Monster Hunter Wilds and Onimusha: Way of the Sword. As cool as those games look, I’ve got my retro sights set on Capcom Fighting Collection 2. This throwback compilation, which now has an official release date of May 16, 2025, contains eight Capcom games from the before times, both of the 2D and 3D varieties. It will retail for $39.99 and launch on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PS4 and Steam.
Sure, the 2D stuff like Street Fighter Alpha and Capcom Fighting Evolution appear compelling enough, although I’d be lying if I said younger me predictably turned my nose up at any software which stubbornly refused to enter the third dimension. Back in those days, I thought 3D was the future, and subsequently the only way to properly experience video games, really. I remember when I first got my PS1, I actively avoided all 2D titles, because to me, they felt outdated, even archaic. This ultimately meant I missed out on great games like In the Hunt—I didn’t want something I could play on my SNES, basically. I’ve since changed my tune (thank God) but long ago, that’s where I was at. My brain was developing, man. It’s a miracle I’m even still alive.
Fast forward a few years and we meet Capcom’s Power Stone series, which kicked off with an original entry on the endlessly innovative and sadly ill-fated Sega Dreamcast. The home version of Power Stone was a faithful port of its NAOMI arcade sibling, an elusive cabinet I’ve yet to see in the wild, come to think of it. In North America, Power Stone launched with the ‘It’s Thinking’ console on 9/9/99, alongside a bevy of other excellent options, like Hydro Thunder, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, Soul Caliber, NFL 2K and Sonic Adventure, among others. Hell, we can even throw horror jank-fest Blue Stinger in there too. Bless its heart.
I never did procure a Dreamcast copy of Power Stone, despite reading glowing reviews earlier that year. I do remember wishing it had online play, which honestly would have swayed me, because the Dreamcast did ship with a 56K modem, after all. Unfortunately, the only things you could use it for at launch were subscribing to AT&T’s Worldnet dial-up service, checking email, playing turn-based Sega Swirl, and downloading VMU games or Sonic Adventure holiday themes.
Then, in the year 2000, Power Stone 2 released, and I did grab a copy of that, mostly because the game had a local 4-player mode, and characters ran around inside massive, constantly changing arenas. Still no online capabilities, though. However, I do vaguely remember reading in EGM that Power Stone 2 supported network play in Japan, and that totally bummed me out, because Chu Chu Rocket was the only real-time online Dreamcast title I owned at the time. I could definitely be misremembering this, and I can’t find anything on old forums and such, so if anyone has confirmation or denial of the Japan-only network feature, please let me know.
On that note, even the PSP port Power Stone Collection, which featured ad-hoc multiplayer, didn’t have online play.
I tell you these stories to essentially say, Capcom is now bringing rollback netcode to both Power Stone and Power Stone 2 (plus all the other games in the collection), something I’ve dreamed about enjoying for a full 25 years now. It will be like reliving those halcyon Dreamcast days, only as if we’d gotten SegaNet from the very beginning, and all these acclaimed arcade fighters contained online multiplayer capabilities by default. Admittedly, playing a fighting game over a 56K connection probably wouldn’t have been ideal, exactly, but it would have been fun.
And speaking of, the amount of hours I sunk into Power Stone 2 with friends was obscene. It’s tailormade for groups of laughing people, not unlike Mario Kart, in that it’s chaotic, vibrant and unpredictable, and at some point, you run away from a giant boulder. I look forward to revisiting the Power Stone universe in May, and pretending I’ve got a spaceship-shaped Dreamcast controller in my now much older hands.
