It has become commonplace in the entertainment industry to play on the nostalgia of old. Remakes and reboots frolic in the fields, reigniting the flames of childhood within many of us, while exposing new generations to their hopefully intact greatness. Capcom recently restored two entries in a cult classic series: Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge and Darkstalkers 3.

Let me be plain: Darkstalkers is old. The same year that Night Warriors came out, OJ Simpson was found innocent. When Darkstalkers 3 was released, El Nino was still a thing. That all being said, where Capcom’s other flagship series, Street Fighter, focused on a more sensible, digestible framework, Darkstalkers punched that sensibility in the face. With a half-naked cat lady.

For the uninitiated, Darkstalkers  began to include a lot of features that have grown into crucial building blocks of many other modern fighting games. Things like EX super moves, air blocking, reversals, and an overarching sense of madness. This all tied in very well with the unorthodox characters and all-around wackiness that the game exuded. Now this is not all to say that Darkstalkers has aged like a fine wine, but its no rotten apple, either. After all, being on the cutting edge of technology does not necessarily make a great fighting game, they’re more often judged on their core gameplay and overall feel. In the latter, I feel that Darkstalkers is a great success, the former drifts closer to the middle of the pack, in my mind.

What’s truly important here, however, is how the redux handles itself. Nothing bothers a stolid gamer more than paying money for a terrible reskin of something old, and in this regard, Resurrection does not disappoint. Many game made before the major aspect ratio shift feature prominent (and truly annoying) black bars on the side of most modern televisions, a space which is capitalized on with a series of challenges and achievements to be completed in the game. Not only do these serve as an outstanding guidance tool for newer players, they also reward dedicated fighters with points to be redeemed in the vault, which contains plenty of goodies for players.

The game boasts an impressive cartoony feel, bolstered not only by smooth animations and fluid motion, but by a quirky cast of decidedly non-standard fighting game fauna, each with a distinct style and buckets of personality in their animations alone. These feature from the more well-known Morrigan (a sexy succubus) and Felicia (token cat-girl), to Q-Bee (a bee lady, what did you expect?) and my personal favorite, Jon Talbain (a badass werewolf). And while the roster feels small, each character boasts some sort of unique gameplay feature, much akin to the more modern Blazblue concept of Drives. Victor von Gerdenheim, for instance, has attacks that build in power and range if the player delays their attacks and allows power to build.

The most impressive feat present in the port, however, is the connectivity. The multiplayer is virtually lag free, giving players little-to-no excuse for their failures in the faces of others, and perhaps most impressive, allows players to link the game to a YouTube account and immediately post replays and facilitate discussion and/or trashtalking as the situation merits, something I feel that many fighting games should look to in the future (Seriously, fighting game fans are some of the most vain people I know).

It’s not all sugar and rainbows, however, the overall UI experience is a little clunky and has a tendency to ignore and sense of traditional arrangements, and in the face of more modern games there was a small struggle for the game to truly hold my interest from a competitive standpoint. Let me tell you my system for determining how much I love a fighting game: how angry I get after losing several matches in a row online is directly proportional to how much I actually like it. I could lose ten matches in a row in Street Fighter x Tekken and not bat an eye, but three matches in Persona Arena and I’m on the verge of cracking my controller casing on my own skull. While I love the style of the characters and the personality they exude, the end result was a decided lack of rage when I was invariably defeated by someone else who was alive during the Clinton years.

All-in-all I would recommend the game to be played, if only to show Street Fighter players the other baby from their favorite company, and to show all the Arc System Works fans the game that theoretically fathered many of the concepts they treasure now. The game is available on PSN and Xbox Live for $14.99 or 1200 MS points, respectively.