The first X-Men video game for the Sega Genesis came out in 1993, when I was 11. While I didn’t have a Genesis myself at the time, I had at least a couple friends who did and I spent many an afternoon following school holed up in one of their basements or living rooms mooching off their sweet, sweet consoles.
By 1996 or so, I did get a Genesis to call my own. I played it on and off for many years, even bringing it along to college with me—Sonic the Hedgehog 3 got me through finals my sophomore year as I’d just play, write a paper, play, study for a test, play, sleep a few hours, play, and maybe eat once in awhile if the steady diet of gold rings and knowledge wasn’t doing it.
Since most of my friends at least watched the X-Men cartoon even if they weren’t comics-reading full-fledged nerds like me, they had the X-Men game. When I got a Genesis, I think I either bought the game or got it from one of my buddies who had no more use for it.
I present this preface to illustrate that I have been playing the Sega Genesis X-Men game for roughly 18 years now and I have still never come anywhere close to beating it.
I braved an electrical storm and pumped about 30 pounds worth of quarters into
the X-Men Arcade Game to beat Magneto’s ass. I rented and polished off X-Men 2: Clone Wars, the sequel to the Genesis game, which would in theory, be tougher, but no.
Let me speak first to the virtues of this game.
The graphics are rad. They were awesome in 1993, and I daresay almost two decades later in the world of 3-D and polygons are whatever they still rock. It looked like the comics I was reading at the time, as if they’d pulled Jim Lee and Andy Kubert’s energy and dumped them into my TV with all the crackle and sexiness therein.
There are a crap load of characters in this game, and given that the X-Men has always been a franchise at its best—in my opinion—when it’s filled to brimming with personas, I dug that. To start, you can play as Wolverine, Cyclops, Gambit or Nightcrawler and can rotate between the four. You also get assists from Storm, Iceman, Rogue, Archangel and Jean Grey. You get to fight Juggernaut, Deathbird, Apocalypse, Ahab and Magneto, to name a few. The levels take you everywhere from Mojoworld to Excalibur’s Lighthouse; it really is a full X-Men experience.
Also, the music was bad ass, both to my 11-year-old ears and in a nostalgic sense looking back. Fletcher Beasley (thanks, Wikipedia) rocked it with a hard-edged techno beat that felt right for the X-Men.
Ok, now to bitch about how impossible this game was/is/will forever be.
Your mutant powers are, on the whole, terrible, or rather your ability to use them is. Wolverine has his claws and an incredibly slow moving healing factor that does you no good against anybody tougher than a generic Savage Land tribesman. Cyclops’ optic blast is so tiny it looks like you are firing the puck from Pong at your opponents. In order for Gambit to actually throw a playing card, you need to execute some elaborate button-pushing sequence more appropriate for Street Fighter or it just hovers in front of you like a pink bug zapper. Nightcrawler teleports into walls. To make matters worse, you have a power bar right next to your life bar, so you have a limited amount of uses of your crappy mutant abilities. You will be longing for Colossus’ angry yell energy spark or even Dazzler’s dainty light grenades by the end of level one.
Remember those guest star assists I mentioned earlier? It’s virtually impossible to beat bosses without them, but also almost as tough to figure out how to execute them. Unless you time it perfectly, Rogue will fly in and punch the air rather than the guy you’re fighting. Archangel is a little better/more frustrating in the sense that he will shoot wing darts at the air three times as opposed to just once. My natural inclination to want to use Iceman after my excitement over seeing him in a video game tends to make me forget he’s only there to make ice bridges and thus useless unless there’s a long jump I want to avoid (in other words, I gave Juggernaut a lot of ice bridges to run across and kill me from). Storm is really the only surefire helper, as she fries everybody on the screen, so of course the enemies tend to flee a second after you’ve called her. And since you burn through these assists the minute you use them and can’t get them back until you die, you better use them right the first time out the gate or memorize them for next time after you’ve sacrificed Nightcrawler to get all your power back.
Also, you can’t die from falling down into pits because Jean Grey comes and retrieves you, though it does cost you a little bit of life each time; this might seem like it’s a kindness, but really it just means if you’re stuck and want to start over without hitting reset, it’s death by a thousand paper cuts rather than being able to run yourself through with a sword.
It’s also hard to jump; really, really hard. Wolverine is short, so he can’t jump. Cyclops is lanky, so he can’t jump. Gambit has a trench coat, so, you know, wind resistance. In theory, being able to jump should be one of Nightcrawler’s chief assets, so instead they have him do some flip thing in the air that, again, makes jumping virtually impossible; also, he does a ridiculous dropkick.
The bosses are incredibly difficult. Juggernaut just runs back and forth, but being unstoppable, you can’t do much to him unless you hit him in the head at the exact right time or use all your assists to get past him (guess which one I did). Deathbird jumps away to the other side of the screen any time you make contact, and, again, you can’t jump too well. Apocalypse can create an impenetrable barrier around himself at a moment’s notice that drains half your life. I hear you get to fight Ahab, Mojo, Magneto and maybe a Sentinel as well, but I wouldn’t know.
Finally, you only get one life with each character, though you are able to swap them out at will, so you can have four guys die in rapid succession rather than be allowed the dignity of just accepting that you can’t get past the Shi’Ar airlock once and putting in Tecmo Bowl. There are, of course, no continues or saves.
To sum it up: I was able to grow up and get a job at the company that makes X-Men before I was able to beat this X-Men video game.
If anybody has beaten the game, I’d love to hear your stories. I’d also love to borrow your Sega Genesis, as my sister’s pet rabbit bit a hole in the plug to mine.
Pretend one of us is named Michael.
The Silver Surfer occupies an interesting place in the broad spectrum of classic characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby during their landmark run on Fantastic Four. Like the Inhumans, he’s an exotic character who makes for an impactful guest star. However, like The Black Panther, he’s also a figure with depth and an intriguing background who can sustain his own mythology to a degree. It’s tempting to write him off as somebody who works better weaving in and out of series starring other folks and existing on the fringe of the Marvel Universe—and he’s not in lousy company in this regard when it comes to many of the Lee/Kirby inventions from said FF stint—but he’s got quite a few quality stories centered around him as the protagonist.
The Galactus Trilogy (FANTASTIC FOUR v1 #48-50)
SILVER SURFER v1
SILVER SURFER v2 by Steve Englehart
SILVER SURFER: REQUIEM
“On the Last Day” (NOVA v4 #13-15)
Fantastic Four: The Animated Series
If you don't have plans to see this movie, you can check the spoilers here and then come back.
The first X-Men video game for the Sega Genesis came out in 1993, when I was 11. While I didn’t have a Genesis myself at the time, I had at least a couple friends who did and I spent many an afternoon following school holed up in one of their basements or living rooms mooching off their sweet, sweet consoles.
Let me speak first to the virtues of this game.
Ok, now to bitch about how impossible this game was/is/will forever be.
Remember those guest star assists I mentioned earlier? It’s virtually impossible to beat bosses without them, but also almost as tough to figure out how to execute them. Unless you time it perfectly, Rogue will fly in and punch the air rather than the guy you’re fighting. Archangel is a little better/more frustrating in the sense that he will shoot wing darts at the air three times as opposed to just once. My natural inclination to want to use Iceman after my excitement over seeing him in a video game tends to make me forget he’s only there to make ice bridges and thus useless unless there’s a long jump I want to avoid (in other words, I gave Juggernaut a lot of ice bridges to run across and kill me from). Storm is really the only surefire helper, as she fries everybody on the screen, so of course the enemies tend to flee a second after you’ve called her. And since you burn through these assists the minute you use them and can’t get them back until you die, you better use them right the first time out the gate or memorize them for next time after you’ve sacrificed Nightcrawler to get all your power back.
Also, you can’t die from falling down into pits because Jean Grey comes and retrieves you, though it does cost you a little bit of life each time; this might seem like it’s a kindness, but really it just means if you’re stuck and want to start over without hitting reset, it’s death by a thousand paper cuts rather than being able to run yourself through with a sword.
The bosses are incredibly difficult. Juggernaut just runs back and forth, but being unstoppable, you can’t do much to him unless you hit him in the head at the exact right time or use all your assists to get past him (guess which one I did). Deathbird jumps away to the other side of the screen any time you make contact, and, again, you can’t jump too well. Apocalypse can create an impenetrable barrier around himself at a moment’s notice that drains half your life. I hear you get to fight Ahab, Mojo, Magneto and maybe a Sentinel as well, but I wouldn’t know.
To sum it up: I was able to grow up and get a job at the company that makes X-Men before I was able to beat this X-Men video game.
I’d wager when asked to picture The Hulk—a bizarre request in everyday life, but totally par for the course if you’re reading this blog, I imagine—most of you flash to a desert or shattered cityscape as your setting, the big guy having either leapt into scene or just finished demolishing an opponent and probably lots of property. Cinematic and television portrayals of the character tend to point him towards either heavily urban areas rife for destruction or the calm of nature for moments of reflection that play against the beast’s violent existence.
The presence of a diverse cast that varies not just in character but their very species, from the familiar Brood to the races dreamt up by Greg Pak and his conspirators, sits at the core of Planet Hulk. As Pak has said many times, Planet Hulk—and his indeed his entire run with The Hulk—is largely about a monster finding his place and that there’s somewhere for everybody to belong; that Bruce Banner needs to travel light years and associate with bugs who walk like men to find his was a great tale to tell, and the gaining and losing of this enriched the overall lore.
Among the many beauties of PAD’s “Professor Hulk” was that he could recognize the absurdity of certain situations, even if that didn’t necessarily mean he would do much to combat said absurdity (like when he had the giant gun and the bunny slippers during “War and Pieces”). When it came to “Troyjan War,” Banner felt out of his element as a guy who solved most problems via punching when he got stuck floating through the cosmos or on the verge of that situation when in space stations he could not cut loose in lest he risk losing gravity’s sweet embrace. PAD and Frank made the most of this for laughs and sight gags, as they so often expertly did, whether it was Hulk sitting on the Silver Surfer’s board to hitch a ride or the goofy visual of him in a giant space suit. There were hard-hitting emotional elements to “Troyjan War” that I would delve deeper into were this post solely about that story, but as with all the crème de la crème of the PAD run, that didn’t stop it from being funny as well.
I’m not as familiar with the classic Hulk stories set in Jarella’s world or the Bill Mantlo “Crossroads” stuff, but while I know they take place in other dimensions rather than outer space, there’s certainly a common ground there. From what I’ve gathered, in both cases and a lot of others, it’s the Hulk’s durability as a character that can move between genres and landscapes with relative ease given how his demeanor and language is fairly adaptable, that makes him ideal for stories like the ones Harlan Ellison liked to dabble in. You move Spider-Man to the Microverse, there’s a certain amount of incompatibility that demands to be played for laughs just with the quips, but Hulk can grunt and punch his way through a fantasy setting or be darkly clever in sci-fi; green and purple seems to blend.
However, it’s also about breaking beyond the brilliant Jekyll/Hyde dynamic the Hulk’s existence centers around and flipping it on its axis. In stories like Planet Hulk or in the journeys to Jarella’s, we get to see our hero take a break from being the outcast and affirm or question his own values when he’s on the same setting as those around him rather than consumed with being hunted and hounded.
