Justice League Task Force was not very good

I’m not talking about Justice League Task Force the comic book, mind you. While I only own a few issues, Christopher Priest had a run as writer, and that generally ensures a certain degree of quality at least for a stretch. And while I loathe the “pro-active” super team chestnut, the Secret Defenders rotating line-up one is fun. Hey, did Justice League Task Force steal that gimmick from Secret Defenders or vice versa?

But I’m getting off topic—allow me to set the stage…

It’s 1995, I’m 13 years old, I’m huge into comics and while I’m only really versed in video games as far as my spare time at my friend Matt’s will allow me since I’ve only got an original NES with a partially rabbit-chewed wire, I do have some favorites, among them Street Fighter II. Thus the announcement of a fighting game featuring the Justice League seems like a slam dunk to me and I’m counting the days until Blockbuster gets their rental shipment in.

Any fan of comics and/or video game who has played Justice League Task Force is likely now cringing at my misplaced anticipated excitement.

To first give credit where credit is due, I liked and still dig the graphics on Justice League Task Force. The figures are colorful and energetic, looking like they’re straight out of a comic book, but the right mix of cartoony Street Fighter with more realistic Mortal Kombat living in harmony. The characters moved well enough—the women are in a kind of permanent uncomfortable looking crane pose—and the special moves look suitably neat. The mini movie that kicks the whole thing off is pretty well done too, with the cuts to all the locales and looming Darkseid promising a dope story to move this thing along.

And that’s where the good stuff ends.

The plot is that you’re a member of the Justice League going around visiting your friends to get info, but they all attack you and you need to fight them before gradually realizing they’re all android clones created by Darkseid. Then you beat Cheetah and Despero. Then you fight Darkseid. It ain’t Shakespeare, but it’s good enough for a 90’s fighting game, I guess.

You can play as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman or Green Arrow. No Green Lantern or Martian Manhunter, which is a shame as both ring constructs and shape shifting would have made for some diverse special moves, but as I’ll get to, a variety of fighting options is not really this game’s strong suit. It’s 1995, so Superman has a mullet. Also, Aquaman carries a trident around because that’s presumably easier to program than getting whales to jump on and off the screen.

Each character has their own location-specific background, which is pretty slick as far as Gotham, Metropolis, Themyscira, Atlantis and The Flash Museum—complete with statue of dead Barry Allen—but I guess they ran out of budget because Green Arrow gets a forest clearing. Cheetah is in the desert, Despero is on a spaceship and of course the final battle with Darkseid is on a so-so Apokolips.

So far not terrible, but keep in mind I’ve really just given you the set up—now it’s time to play the game.

Remember back in the 60’s where those old school Justice League stories paired off the various members of the team and so none could be distinguishable from the others they not only had the same personalities but virtually the same powers as well? By that I mean that even if Green Arrow was teamed with Superman, GA would have “fire arrows” and “ice arrows” so anything Supes could do with heat vision or arctic breath he could approximate. Likewise they’d use comics super science to explain how anything Green Lantern could do with his ring, Flash could do with speed. And maybe Batman had a magic lasso or something, I don’t know.

While I’d like to think the creators of Justice League Task Force were paying in homage to Gardner Fox and company, in reality, they seemingly just got really lazy, because everybody in this game has the same moves.

Superman has heat vision and arctic breath, while Green Arrow has fire and ice arrows and Batman has fire and ice Batarangs—all are the same. You can do the same shit with Aquaman’s trident you can do with Wonder Woman’s lasso. The only guy who really has his own move set is Flash, who has an awesomely cheap one where you can just keep running across the screen in continuous motion so whoever you’re fighting keeps getting punched and can’t stop you; it’s the JLTF equivalent of playing Street Fighter as E. Honda and doing that million punches thing (which I always do). Also, Flash can create tornados—who knew.

Anyways, you’ve basically got six characters with about six total moves between them and it gets real old real fast.

Oh, also Superman and Wonder Woman can fly, but they can’t really attack well while flying, so it’s somewhat useless.

Long story short, Justice League Task Force is a pretty game to look at, but you get sick of actually playing it really quick. You’d hope they’d redeem that somewhat with cool character endings, but again, they all have the same one.

I may not know much about video games, but I know what I like, and this wasn’t it. I will, however, throw a bone to the game’s developers because they also made Death and Return of Superman, which was awesome and my friend Chris and I stayed up through an entire night of college to beat it. I don’t see a world where I will ever grow tired of beating up thugs named Molotov as Superboy in the leather jacket and John Lennon glasses he should still be wearing today (and forever).

Why I never beat X-Men for Genesis

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.

Looks Like Ben Is Buying A PS3 This Month

More info here.

Ben's original love letter here.

My Five Favorite NES Games

Due to personal circumstances, I may be the only dude in the geek universe who didn’t get to see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World this weekend, but I’m super-psyched to get to the theater hopefully next weekend. So as not to feel completely left out, however, I thought I’d bust out a list of my five all-time favorite video games for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, many of which influenced big chunks of both the Scott Pilgrim series and film.

I was the kid who was always about a generation behind when it came to video games. When everybody else had an NES, I had an Atari; when I got my NES, other folks had moved onto Genesis or Super Nintendo; I finally got an N64 in like 2003 when my buddy Matt got bored with his and let me take it to college. None of this ever really bothered me, though, as I had plenty of friends who had the latest goods and it was fun to head over to their houses and check out the latest (even though it always sucked when their moms would yell at us to get some fresh air).

By the early-90’s when I did pick up my first NES, I already had a bunch of titles I wanted to grab myself or borrow from pals. Later on, in college, my main man Jordan brought his system to school our sophomore year when we were (practically) neighbors and he had about a zillion games, so that was a whole new renaissance. From both those eras of Ben’s gaming, here are the five elite jams (and my memory is crap, so as soon as I publish this I’ll remember a dozen others I loved; I’m already wondering if I should have included Nintendo Golf, Double Dragon, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six…).

5. BUBBLE BOBBLE
This was a crazy little game I used to play with my little sister in one of our major sibling bonding experiences of our early years.

You and whoever you played with (it was definitely way better as a two-player game) were two little dinosaurs who could blow bubbles (hence the name) and then use your noggins to move said bubbles around or pop them, solving puzzles and defeating bad guys. There were hundreds of levels to wade through and tons of neat variations that made for a fun lengthy gaming experience and a swell way to kill an afternoon.

4. SUPER MARIO BROTHERS 3
There’s no way you can chalk up the weirdness of the Mario Brothers franchise to just Japanese culture or whatever. Super-powered plumbers in a land of evil turtles who get special powers from mushrooms and flowers? I’m sorry, but there’s definitely more than meets the eye to all that, and some day I hope there’s a tell-all on where the heck it came from.

But regardless, pretty much every game in the series from the 80’s to today is a winner and great fun to play. Especially in the early games—the even-weirder-than-usual second one aside—there was a pretty consistent formula of straight ahead challenges and kinetic fun that carries through to the most recent installments.

Super Mario Brothers 3 is the one I most fondly remember with crazy stuff like the raccoon suit and the sprawling level maps; definitely a prototype of many great games to come.

3. ZELDA II: THE ADVENTURE OF LINK
Years later, I’d whittle away countless hours of my life playing A Link to the Past in my friend Matt’s basement for Super Nintendo, but Adventure of Link was the first Zelda game I really dug and one I’d rediscover years later as a college student.

Most Zelda games appeal to my love of mythology and appreciation for puzzles and other challenges that made you think beyond just jumping on mushrooms or punching bad guys. I never really appreciated the first Zelda because the bird’s eye view was a bigger knock for me than it probably should have been, but this one was mostly side-scroller, so I was all good. I also really liked being able to upgrade my different attributes as Link by beating different levels, something that wasn’t commonplace in games back then.

The other cool thing about Adventure of Link was that I turned out to be insanely good at it when Jordan and I popped it in, so I earned my amigo’s respect.

2. TECMO SUPER BOWL
Football has always been one sport I really enjoy watching and part of me would have loved to have played, but I was both too scrawny and pretty terrible at it, so instead I ended up a wrestler since there you’re always up against guys your own size no matter how tiny you are.

However, football video games have always been the refuge of “love-but-can’t-play” types such as myself, and Tecmo Super Bowl (not just Tecmo Bowl, there’s a difference) remains for me the bar by which all others are judged.

Even back in 1991, most football games were already starting to adopt the QB’s eye view look, but as an avid side-scroller man, I appreciated Tecmo stacking the linebackers on top of one another and keeping it looking like Mario playing football. It certainly made it easier for me to perfect my “run all the way back out of the Shotgun and throw a Hail Mary” strategy as Jim Kelly that I still use to this day playing Madden. TSB allowed crazy junk like that as well as 50-yard field goals and more.

TSB was also one of the very first game to actually work with the NFL to license team and player names, so you didn’t have to ID your guys by just numbers and suffer through generic colors to label your squad. It also made it much more satisfying when you could knock Phil Simms out of action on a nasty blitz. The regular season mode was ahead of its time and you could also pull lopsided trades to create dream teams and enjoy awesome cut scenes whenever you notched a touchdown.

1. MEGA MAN 3
I had the sort of bizarre relationship with Mega Man 3 only a 9-year-old with the beginnings of future anxiety disorders can have with a video game.

It was prominently displayed for months at Wellesley Video (my local video store pre-Blockbuster Invasion) and I wanted to play it in the worst way, but I didn’t have a Nintendo at the time. When we finally got an NES, my parents got me Mega Man 3 as a Christmas present (I think) and for some reason I got really scared and didn’t want to take it out of the package. So it sat in my attic or something for weeks and we ended up giving it away to one of my cousins or something—to this day I have no idea when 9-year-old me was thinking or why this went down the way it did, but oh well.

Down the line, I ended up renting the game, as despite the weird trauma, it remained my holy grail of gaming (clearly my parents were very patient people). I spent hours navigating its extremely tricky challenges and somewhat sluggish controls (man jumping was hard), but it was super-rewarding when I finally got the hand and started taking out Robot Masters.

Years later, Jordan and I would go nuts trying to blast our way through the entire Mega Man series anew, and again I remember the third game, with the debut of Rush and Proto-Man, plus some truly great bosses like Spark Man, Gemini Man and of course Hard Man, standing out.

Even though it could be frustrating as hell, I definitely dug on the fact that Mega Man was more difficult to win than a lot of other NES games of the time. I was also grateful that it was among the first to have a password function—basically the first iteration of a save feature—so you didn’t need to beat it all in one sitting (which would have been nigh impossible, but most early video games did indeed demand just that). I also loved the cartoonish yet cool look of the characters—very comic book-y and indeed very Scott Pilgrim these days—as well as there being a back story I could latch onto with Dr. Light, Dr. Wily, the mysterious relationship between Mega and Proto, et al.

So it took a bit of a lengthy and strange path to find its way to me, but I would say Mega Man 3 is probably my favorite NES game of all-time.

AIM Adventures: Million Dollar Idea

Ben just had a great idea and needs some feedback. Fortunately, Alex is on AIM...

Ben: Let me run this by you
Ben: Idea for a video game: fighting game where you can play as anybody from any Real World or Road Rules ala Marvel vs Capcom or Mortal Kombat vs DC
Alex: ooh
Alex: I'd play that if you throw in the Jersey Shore people as unlockable characters.
Ben: Yes! I was also thinking about incorporating The Hills, but possibly as a second game
Alex: Hm. I'd play that.
Ben: Right?
Ben: Eric Nies vs The Miz? Who wouldn't want to see that
Ben: A Judd Winick/Puck grudge match?
Alex: Judd Winick vs. RACHEL
Ben: Judd Winick vs the world
Ben: He gets the first solo game, like how Sub-Zero got his own game
Alex: I support this
Ben: Glad to have you onboard
Alex: You have my full support with this project.

Remember the X-Men arcade game?

There are those who would have you believe that Pacman or Mortal Kombat or NFL Blitz or Ms. Pacman is the greatest arcade game of all-time, but these people are crackheads, liars and fools. The one and only true claimant to that prestigious throne is the legendary X-Men arcade game of 1992.

Those who experienced the magic in their youth know what I'm talkin bout (I'd include you kids with your emulators, but seriously, this was something you needed to do live and in color). The truly fortunate knew the X-Men game as that massive construct over in the corner that spread its action across two full-size screens in such a manner that characters went dark if they ran across the middle too fast. You recall getting to one of the six joystick arrays as fast as you could and being sure to have plenty of quarters in tow, lest you lose your spot or have to leave to refill and then come back with only Dazzler available to play as (crammed up in the corner spot where it was nigh impossible to see the action no less). You remember not caring that Sentinels were the same size as you as you dispatched them by the dozen and not asking why the Juggernaut needed some sort of bazooka.

The X-Men arcade game followed Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Dazzler--provided you had at least five friends--as they battled through the streets of (maybe) New York, the Savage Land, multiple high tech bases and elsewhere trying to save Professor X and Kitty Pryde, who had been kidnapped by Magneto. In addition to being able to punch, slash and kick, each character got a special mutant power that you stored and saved for the bosses (or when you were fighting too many lizard dudes and got frustrated). Of course since Wolverine just being able to pop his claws wouldn't be too visually impressive and you didn't want Colossus to be flesh-toned the bulk of the game, Wolvie got "adamantium laser claws" that shot big ass beams while Pete flexed his metal muscles to release a huge energy spark and yell like a constipated grizzly bear.

It was awesome.

Another thing that was awesome was the graphics. It was 1992 and we had just barely gotten our minds wrapped around Super Nintendo, so even for an arcade game, X-Men had and incredibly slick, vibrant look plus wicked G.I. Joe-quality animation sequences. But as killer as the graphics were, the sound was even better, as the boom of this game echoed through the arcade, which rocked since it was ridiculously quotable, whether the Blob was insisting "Nothing stops...the Blob!" or Wendigo was screeching his name time and again as you beat the white fur off him.

I've got two very vivid memories of the X-Men arcade game. The first occured one summer somewhere in the neighborhood of 1993 when I was like 11 and at Camp Frank A. Day. At the end of every July, we would take a trip to the Riverside amusement park (today Six Flags New England) for a day of rides, games and bad food. However, what I would get most excited about, being averse to heights and shitty at getting rings around milk bottles, would be holing up in the big ass arcade and stretching out the $15 they'd give us for the day at the X-Men arcade game. This particular year, I had to have been at the game for hours, alternating characters as I ran to get quarters, but teaming with the same group of seven or eight kids to get all the way to the end. It took us hours, and we barely noticed that a massive thunderstorm had formed around the park, shutting most everything down (that we were in an open air structure and failed to note the massive quantities of rain and huge lightning crashes I like to think speaks to our dedication and nothing else). I was mindful of the time and that I was going to miss the bus back to camp if we didn't clear Asteroid M pretty soon, but as we were on the precipice, the storm surged and knocked out the power of every machine in the arcade. When it rebooted, there we were, crestfallen and back at the opening screen.

I believe it was the next year that my family took a vacation to Disney World and nestled in the tiny game room of our Polynesian-themed resort hotel I located a more modest version of the X-Men arcade game with only one screen and four players. It was rare that there was anybody else around the game outside of occasionally my little sister, so for the most part, I wound up playing the game myself, which I had never really done before. On the smaller screen and able to select your player as opposed to the characters being married to a particular location, I developed a new appreciation for Cyclops, who I had previously stayed away from by virtue of him being the upper left-hand corner guy. His optic blasts were way easier to control than just about any other mutant power and the guy had a mean jumping spin kick for a lanky white dude. All on my own I never made it to far into the deep levels, but I did rack up killer high scores as Cyclops that got erased each night when the place shut down.

It wasn't until college that I made the miraculous discovery that the X-Men arcade game was actually based on an aborted 1989 animated pilot called Pryde of the X-Men. Neelless to say I hopped right on eBay and made that sucker mine; it has been a prized possession for several years now. A whole other post would be required to expound on the virtues of Australian Wolverine calling Toad a "bloody dingo" and creepy child molester Nightcrawler hitting on Kitty Pryde, but some day soon I will find the strength.

Bottom line: my wedding is coming up in about a month and a half and if you can find one of those coin-op suckers, it would not be an inappropriate gift.