It's been debated for years, but Capcom have arguably won the battle. Behind the scenes, people have fiercely fought both the side of Capcom with their perennial Street Fighter series, or championed SNK, with their long-standing and admirable work within the 2D fighting genre. Capcom vs SNK Millenium Fight 2000 (CvS), then, developed by Capcom, doesn't aim to settle this ever-lasting argument but instead lets players stand off their favourite avatars against each other.

With the swathes of 2D fighters released by these two companies over the last decade ever-increasing, fighting games need to have unique selling points to allow them to stand head and shoulders above the crowd. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 managed it by simply making the combat far more frenetic than had been seen before, but CvS's unique selling point is quite advantageous: SNK characters on an affordable console. The Neo Geo stands out of reach for many gamers, and CvS brings the SNK favourites to a mainstream console powerful enough – and with sufficient available RAM – to do justice to the company’s characters. Combine with this the ability to have teams of SNK and Capcom warriors squaring it up against each other, and there should be a winning formula here.

Obviously, mixing characters from across different titles has its problems. With all SNK games having only four buttons to play around with, Capcom had two choices: they could either dumb-down the Capcom characters or over-complicate the SNK characters - Capcom wisely opted for the former. Not only has this saved them from many headaches in trying to balance the SNK characters with their counterparts, but has also created a completely different control scheme for the Capcom characters, differentiating this game from the slew of rehashes released in recent years. Capcom vs. SNK 2, however, opted for the latter route making the whole game feel far less individual than its older incarnation.

In an attempt to balance the various fighters, CvS gives each character a "gauge" rating. Characters like Sakura are given the lowest rating, whilst strong boss-type characters like Geese are given the higher ratings. In a team, a player can opt for a maximum of 4 points, giving them the choice of selecting several weaker characters, or a smaller number of more powerful characters. However, this feature simply doesn't work at all. The quantity-over-quality approach is doomed to fail from the start, with characters such as Geese requiring gargantuan punishment before a worthwhile dent appears in his life gauge. Even worse is the fact that two characters with the same ratio take widely varying levels of damage from the same hits, so choosing a winning team isn't so much a choice of using your best characters as it is a choice of who you can use to cheat the system. For example, choosing your favourite characters which you have honed to perfection in other games will get destroyed by a player who is reasonably competent as Geese or Vega. CvS also features the roll, where a player can roll up to an enemy (the player is invincible whilst rolling) and throw the opponent with the minimum of hassle. Various King of Fighters games implemented a similar technique, yet had a slight pause after the dash so it didn't count as an automatic hit. In Capcom vs SNK you can roll up to an opponent, and instantly plant a throw upon a hapless enemy, with no delay for the opponent to strike back. With pretty major flaws such as these, the game can't be considered for serious tournament play.

Presentation in 2D fighters has often separated the men from the boys, and CvS shows up almost every 2D fighter for being bland and unoriginal, even if it has been technically superseded by the likes of Guilty Gear XX. Each battle begins with a stunning cutscene before the fight begins in earnest. Possibly the most interesting one shows an old low-res Spy Hunter clone in action, before the on-screen car crashes into a lorry in a flurry of fire, then the camera zooming back to show a gorgeous cityscape complete with burning lorry in the background. The detail continues into the other backgrounds, with almost every stage having an "effect showpiece", as it were. In the dark alley level, large, detailed shadows of the fighters can be seen in the background, and in another a fire burns in the background, whilst the warm glow shows up on the fighters. Not only do these effects look fantastic, but the best thing is that they are never overused; each stage has it's own level of individuality.

Players will get a deep sense of deja vu whilst looking at the sprites, since many of the Capcom characters have had their sprites used in other games before them. Morrigan's sprite looks completely out of place, featuring possibly the lowest number of frames seen since the pre-Street Fighter Alpha games. As for the other characters, they lack the fluidity of the Street Fighter 3 or Mark of the Wolves characters, and are merely adequate. On the other hand, and after years of seeing the SNK characters in low-resolution, they now look fantastic: redrawn in more detail, with a larger number of frames and in high-res.

Whilst Capcom vs SNK Millenium Fight doesn't set the 2D fighting world alight, it's a fun, slightly flawed, yet visually impressive bundle of joy in an orange case. Can we say fairer than that?