I've been watching the scores for Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes on GameRankings (which I prefer to the competition). One thing that might strike you is that the downloadable game is getting far better review scores than it did when released on the PlayStation and Dreamcast. This is quite the conundrum -- or, as the Thing might exclaim, "Wotta revoltin' development."

Is it that the game gets better with age? Did the reviewers all not play the game the first time around? Or is it just that folks like to play as the cheeky, wisecracking heroes, especially the Marvel heroes and Capcom's Chun-Li, online?

Creepy clown alert. Watch out for John Wayne Gacy in the background!

This might help the understanding. Director Guillermo del Toro ("Pan's Labyrinth") and bestselling novelist Chuck Hogan wrote a piece in The New York Times about why people love vampires. In "Why Vampires Never Die," there's a quote that applies to this game: "In a society that moves as fast as ours, where every week a new ?blockbuster' must be enthroned at the box office, or where idols are fabricated by consensus every new television season, the promise of something everlasting, something truly eternal, holds a special allure."

The heroes of comic books are often everlasting figures who, even when they seem to die, somehow magically come back to life for the next issue. And in this videogame, the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 heroes never expire. I mean, they seemingly perish in many of the short, 90-second battles. But then, if you press Continue, there they are again, alive and vital, like so many Lazaruses or so many vampires. (Lazarus was a vampire, right? They say so on HBO's "True Blood," so it must be true.)

So maybe that's why folks appreciate MvC2 with such utter zeal. It doesn't just provide escapism. It provides you with some semblance of eternal life, however fantastical and, in reality, untrue. The characters will always be there for you. Have a bad day? You don't even need a telephone booth to change into a superhero costume. All you need is your controller and 12 bucks to download 196.7 MB of data.

You got very big guns, Iron Man. Too big.

You will be the same heroes who, if you've read comic books for some time, generate visceral feelings in your mind and soul because of the dramatic stories that have stayed with you. In fact, every time you battle, you will be not one hero. You are forced to be three heroes, a great trinity, if not a holy trinity. Talk about the potential for omniscience.

The first thing that hits you in the game is the obvious charm and savvy in updating it for Xbox Live Arcade. So you see these '80s colors (remember the Ticketron logo?) flashing by as the game starts, and there's this funky, grab-you-by-the-groin pop hook in the background, too. It's part P-Funk, part James Brown and part Jackson 5 -- again, nostalgic yet somehow new. There's this big globe as your videogame interface. From it, you choose three of 56 heroes with which to brawl against the CPU, the pal next to you or your opponents online.

In the moments before you play, you eyeball the detailed backgrounds. You can feel almost feel your pupils widen as you spy a creepy clown's mouth behind the fighters. The backgrounds are not as awe-inspiring as those in BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. But then again, this game isn't $60, either.

So there you are in all your 2-D, single-player glory, tag-team fighting in one of four difficulty levels, amassing points by the millions and getting to know the over-the-top skills of each hero. I mean, check out Amingo, the anthropomorphic cactus with healing powers who dons a sombrero and changes forms, sometimes to this boa-constrictor thing with vines. Vines on a cactus? That'd be some crazy-ass genetic tampering. But it's one of the odd joys pulling off the right moves in the game.

Don't look at the floor, Spidey, or Chun-Li's gonna kick your butt.

You'll also get four characters from Mega Man, including the wily Tron Bonne, the creator of Servbots who also has a serious jones for Mega Man. Nope, there's no Silver Surfer, Thing or Thor. But you get a ton of X-Men characters and a passel of Spider-Man characters, too, including the butt-ugly, long-tongued Venom. And there are over a dozen Street Fighter types -- with the lovely Chun-Li as one of the more powerful, perhaps because of that constant avenging of her dad's ill-timed death.

To be honest, I'd rather play this game on the PlayStation 3 (not out until Aug. 13). The game is fast, very fast, and the buttons on the Xbox 360 controller are harder to press than those on the Sixaxis. After playing once online, I used the Quarter Match option to go couch potato and watch others fight, and happily wonder if their fingers were swelling up to bursting point.

Uh oh. B.B. Hood looks like she needs to poop.

The game, even though it's updated, isn't perfect. You'd have to be quite the nerd to know all the characters, and it'd be great to have a bio/story for each of them. It wouldn't add more than a few megabytes of space, and would make the game a fuller, more imaginative experience. They should have added more than an audio phrase or two for each of the heroes, too. Same goes for that funky song on the interface page that loops over and over, "Gonna take you for a ride." I understand the wisdom of putting that seductive sentence on the hero-selection screen -- but couldn't they have put the whole tune on it?

Yet, despite the niggling, MvC2's a DLC deal indeed (but not as amazing as reviewers elsewhere seem to believe it is). Remember, it's a vampire, eternal.

This review is based on a downloadable copy of the Xbox 360 game provided by the publisher. There was one piece of swag, an LP record with the game's soundtrack.