We’re finally here, it's finally happening. The time has come with the arrival of the summer sun, its crested dawn breaking over the sleep of Canadian winter and a very short, rainy spring. As its light washes over me, radiant and pure, the lifebringer, I am reborn in its image. We’re here, man. Games I actually want to talk about. We’re out of the dark ages of licensed Marvel games, into a new summer warmth. I mean, there's still some ****, but at least it's mostly some cool bad ****.
It's been a long time coming. I first started this whole thing as my second ever article here on RGT, all the way back in September. I knew that obviously playing every retro Marvel game was going to take awhile, and I also knew there was going to obviously be some real low points going through it, but I wasn't prepared.
Here we are now at the gates of the fifth generation, the juggernauts of gaming; the PlayStation, blessed be it's grey plastic housing; the Sega Saturn, which was so bafflingly cursed and famously mishandled; and the Nintendo 64, an overrated console with like four truly good games. Fight me. Early 3D polygons await us here in this journey through the hallowed vaults, and only 8 (technically 9) entries. There weren't many Marvel games here compared to some of the other generations, but everything here is at least interesting.
A Bunch of Capcom Arcade Ports
Platforms: PlayStation, Sega SaturnThe Capcom Marvel arcade games were some of the greatest arcade fighting games the company has put out in their time, and that's saying a lot; most of them got 4’s from me in the arcade years article, after all (except for MSHvsSF, that poor game). They had trend setting features for their time, had the traditional amazing Capcom sprites that were so great they kept using the same ones for years and years, and had such concentrated zany energy befitting their comic book inspirations.
It makes sense why they’d port them in the first place; once we got into this fifth generation of hardware, most home consoles had advanced technologically to where they could handle contemporary arcade game magic and even be recognizable, unlike the vast majority of the previous attempts on earlier hardware. So, Capcom started porting some of their arcade games. Here’s the issue. I said most home consoles were capable of arcade-perfect ports, with most here only meaning the Sega Saturn really. The PlayStation had some memory limitations that really held it back compared to Sega’s 2D behemoth. So, the Sony ports suffered. Oh, did they suffer. Let’s break each game down here, and what exactly was lost.
Let’s start with the first game, X-Men: Children of the Atom. The game kickstarted the whole Marvel series, and is a charming game from back when Capcom was still trying to figure these fighting games out going forward. It was released in the arcades in 1994 to major success. When did it come out in the home console markets? 1998. Later games in the Marvel series had come out on the PS1 before CoTA did. The company handling the port, Probe Entertainment, had such a hard time cramming the game into a tiny PS1 that the game got delayed for years until they more or less gave up, and released the game in the state it was in. And what a state. The final product runs at a cool sub 15 frames per second or so, and features things such as very common stuttering and freezing issues, and half of the animation frames on every move being cut out. It’s just sad to play and to see, to be honest.
Next, Marvel Super Heroes. Coming out in 1997, this was afflicted with the mostly the same problems as CoTA. It runs at a pretty low frame rate as well, though not to the same extent somehow as the previous game; it’s still missing the vast majority of animation frames on moves though, unfortunately, and has almost entirely static backgrounds compared to the very animated ones from the original arcade game. Perhaps it’s explained by Capcom themselves handling this one, but it’s strange that this game handles slightly better than CoTA despite coming out a year earlier.
The third game in the series, X-Men vs Street Fighter, was the start of the really unfortunate issues. Terrible frame performance is bad, but this game got fundamentally butchered. It was the first to introduce the ‘tag’ mechanic into the series, seeing you select two fighters that you can swap between in the middle of the chaotic scramble. What got cut for the PlayStation version? Well, the tag mechanic. You still select two characters, but you are unable to dynamically swap between them. You don’t even swap to your second character after the first one has been defeated for round 2. The only use of your partner character in this version is using them either for alpha counters or a team supers, after which they’ll jump back into the void until called upon again. Obviously, this is a pretty ****ty thing to cut but, again, the limitations of the console made it unfortunately mandatory. The console’s memory could only store two full characters at a time, considering it also had to keep hold of their moves and animations. There is a hidden game mode that sort of rectifies this omission but only through a mirror match; both characters must select the same two characters, then they can swap as normal between them since the console only has to worry about keeping two characters in memory.
Following up this great disappointment, was the eternally overshadowed Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter. It was the first game to introduce the ‘assist’ mechanic that sees you able to call out your second character to do a little attack for you while still keeping control of your current one. This is a huge addition to what would become the MvC formula for the next three games, but nothing else was really improved and the game felt a little lazy, feeling like a slightly inferior XMvsSF. Anyway, this was ported to the PlayStation in the far future of 1999, and unfortunately has the same fundamental issues as the previous ports. This time around, thankfully assists have been kept in the game but you are still unable to tag characters out. At least they kept assists this time; that’s truly taxing the RAM right there.
When the time came for Marvel vs Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes, also in 1999, Capcom decided to do something a little wild. It still follows the trend of ‘tag fighter reduced to single character fighter’ but this time around, you can choose between having your choice of second character being a ‘Partner Character’ or a ‘Special Character’. This lets you choose between the two different terrible port mechanics of either XMvsSF or MSHvsSF; ‘Partner Character’ follows the first and sees your second character only coming out when doing alpha counters or team supers, while ‘Special Character’ calls them out as only assists like in MSHvsSF. It’s…something. I will give them a little bit of credit this time around as it almost feels like a purposeful design decision rather than a hardware limitation. It actually changes the game up considering the original arcade version didn’t have playable characters as assists, or mostly the ability to control what assist you get (outside of some esoteric input codes).
And…that’s it. MvC2 never got a fifth gen console port, only getting sixth gen ones (we’ll get there, though there’s not terribly much to say about them). These were some bad ports, basically. They were all plagued by long loading times, pretty spotty frame rates which is the last thing you want in a fighting game, and cut mechanics in the case of the later tag fighters. It’s sad, but it’s not really anyone’s fault, save for maybe Sony’s decision to have a lower RAM storage on its console. What about the Saturn ports?
They’re great.
They are essentially arcade-perfect ports, save for some cut animation frames here and there. The Saturn was an unstoppable monster of 2D rendering and RAM storage, but it still required some help; many of the later games, such as Marvel Super Heroes and MSHvsSF, required the consoles RAM expansion cartridges to be perfect arcade ports, to be fair to Sony. Here’s the issue though, as I’m sure plenty of you guys know already; these far superior ports were Japanese only, because Sega hated the Saturn and they especially hated you if you weren’t Japanese and had one. They never made it across the pond unfortunately, so I’m sure plenty of people back in the day had no idea they even existed, let alone could import them if they wanted to and could stand them being in Japanese. Nowadays of course, there’s plenty of translations available making the actual 99% accurate arcade ports fully playable even if you don’t speak the native language.
So there we go; me rambling about some bad console ports. A strange opening for the fifth generation Marvel games, but I figured this would be the best way to do it. I still needed to talk about them, but there’d be no point in giving them a score or full entries considering the Sony versions would get terrible values while the Sega versions would be entirely unaffected from the arcade score essentially.
Onto the first actual game; Iron Man and X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal, the longest ****ing name of a Marvel game.
Iron Man and X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal
Developer: Realtime AssociatesPublisher: Acclaim
Platforms: PlayStation, Sega Saturn
Year: 1996
I first played the handheld version of this one back in the GB/GameGear articles, and it was…fine? Does the addition of several times more powerful hardware make it a better game? God no. The issues with Iron Man and X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal isn't just technical, it’s such a terribly designed game.
You can play as, get this, Iron Man or X-O Manowar, a character from Valiant Comics which Acclaim owned by this point. You scroll across some pre-rendered screens and run-and-gun and awkwardly punch, the usual ordeal. Let’s get this out of the way; the game is ****ing ugly. Everything is done using pre-rendering that was briefly popular at this point in gaming, that blurry 3D look that few games I think managed to really pull off. Normally I wouldn’t dunk on a game for this but this game is just so ugly that I have to bring it up. Even Avengers in Galactic Storm looked better than this, and that came out a year prior.
God, this game is ugly.
There are some minor differences between the characters, like Iron Man having a kick for some reason instead of being able to block like X-O Manowar. Both characters otherwise play exactly the same, which is disappointing. X-O Manowar's block effectively works, but pretty much every enemy fires fast enough that you’re not really able to block shots then return fire before another shot is flying at you. It kinda just makes it pointless, ultimately. You either just endlessly block lasers, unable to fire back in-between before you’re able to block again, or you just take the damage and shoot them back in the first place; why even have a block then? The whole game is filled with things like this, half assed and lazy development making an overly frustrating experience.
Enemies are constantly at angles you can’t shoot at, making you frequently have to take shots just to progress. Just look at this ****;
What am I supposed to even do here? I can’t shoot the turrets, they never stop firing, and the only way is to go forward. A classic ‘Iron Man and X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal’ move.
You can also fly, but it controls oddly and I think makes it easier to hit you rather than letting you maneuver around things. Being a run-and-gun sidescrolling affair, your success will come down to acquiring power-ups. There’s health bar extensions to find, energy extensions to let you fly for longer, and most importantly; weapon damage upgrades. You can collect up to four levels of shot upgrades, with each increasing the effectiveness, damage and adding little gimmicks with each level. Level two gives you double shots, the final level adds homing functionality; the usual. The shot upgrades are essential to making it through this frustrating game. The basic damage shots are basically useless against anything more than the basic enemy, so you really have to get those upgrades. Of course when you die you lose a level of your weapon upgrades, meaning you really don’t want to die here. It wouldn’t be so bad if the only consistent way I found to get shot upgrades was from taking down some bosses.
It’s a very poor design to me; you absolutely need weapon upgrades to take down bosses as they are all very frustrating affairs where they kinda just run at you and have huge health bars, in order to get weapon upgrades. With how annoying the bosses are, it’s very easy to lose all your weapon levels when fighting them, and I would just honestly recommend restarting the fight if you die more than once even.
The game is just ultimately very frustrating to play. Your melee attacks have odd hitboxes, the game runs rather choppy, there’s really frustrating enemy placements making you have to eat hits just to move forward (and probably die and lose upgrades), the controls are incredibly stiff, your flight ability isn’t very maneuverable making you more of a target when using it; it’s just not a fun time in any sense of the word. It’s a shame, as it’s kind of a cool idea if they actually bothered to put any effort into making a good game. Overall, the home console version is really about the same terrible experience as the handheld version, just in different ways.
The soundtrack isn’t bad?
Score
1 ½ Repulsors out of 5.
Incredible Hulk: The Pantheon Saga
Developer: Attention to DetailPublisher: Eidos
Platforms: PlayStation, Sega Saturn
Year: 1997
Oh boy, does this game deliver some ****. This is an infamous game, and honestly likely one of the worst Marvel games ever made. It is a borderline unplayable mess that deserves to be in the same tier of discussion as the Holy Trinity so far; Uncanny X-Men, GBA Mutant Academy, and GBA Ultimate Alliance. This is something really, really special.
You’re once again thrown into the shoes of the Hulk, adapting very loosely a new comic arc at the time, the Pantheon; everyone is a radical 90s-ified Greek hero, basically. You start out trapped in a base called The Mount and surrounded by robots, and from the very first screen I knew what I was in for.
What did they do to you, Banner? What happened to your head?
I’ve never played this game, but I’ve heard such stories that I felt they had to be somewhat exaggerated. No, no they are not. Let’s get the obvious out of the way once again; it’s another pre-rendered graphics experience, and just like Iron Man and X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal it’s ****ing ugly. Everything is so blurry it’s almost impossible to see any details, even on the Saturn version (all the screenshots here are from the PlayStation).
The graphics aren’t why this is a storied abomination against Jack Kirby. It’s everything else. This game is borderline broken. The hit detection is atrocious, enemies are far too agile considering you control like a lumbering tub of green slick butter, your attacks are bizarre and hardly work the way you need them to. The levels are 90% dreadful ‘find all the switches that almost entirely blend into the background!’ affair; the bosses are just dropped in without any thought just to bash themselves against you without any strategy or effort.
It’s an isometric camera, and is so terribly implemented that it made me pause frequently just to laugh at what I was playing. Combined with the ungodly controls, any form of precise movements or attacks are entirely impossible, creating such a concentrated form of frustration that it may actually create an entirely new emotion in you. Even something as basic as hitting a vast majority of the enemies is a pipe dream due to either the camera making it very hard to tell where they are relative to you, or the controls, or both, or the fact that you can’t even tell the blurry mass apart from the background sometimes. There’s these flying drone enemies that appear semi frequently, and it is just impossible to hit them. It’s not aided by the unfathomably low draw distance, and unfortunately the game calls for tight platforming commonly. This is of course a ****ing terrible combination as the draw distance messes with you when you’re going toward or away from the camera, and the responsiveness of the Hulk’s jumps is non-existent to say the least.
I absolutely love when I can’t even see where I’m jumping when doing platforming. It’s great.
You have a puny little punch, a very slow kick, a dedicated uppercut button for some reason that seems to have the same effect and damage of the kick, and four super moves you can do by holding a shoulder button and hitting one of the face buttons. These are a much more useful ground smash ability, a strangely animated lariat, or the classic clap, here feeling just so completely lame. They also frequently just miss enemies, as of course they do.
There’s just so many terrible decisions involved here. Why are 90% of the levels finding switches for doors? You’re the Hulk, why wouldn’t you just smash them? You take so much ****ing damage from the silliest things and deal so little back that it utterly ruins the vibe of playing as the Hulk. Oh, and there is seemingly no after-hit immunity so I was routinely locked into ridiculous stun lock situations until I died. Of course, that’s essential to this kind of experience.
Oh yeah, I was really having fun playing this. It really captures the feeling of the Hulk.
Pantheon Saga is something that doesn’t come around too often, something so entirely bereft of quality that it’s engrossing. Did anyone who designed this ever play a video game previously? How does it get such basic concepts so wrong? Iron Man and X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal was abysmal as well, but this is somehow worse. Stand aside, eternal punching bags of Mutant Wars and Avengers in Galactic Storm; there’s a new bachelor in the legendarily terrible Marvel game ballroom dance.
Score
½ Gamma Bomb out of 5.
Fantastic 4
Developer: Probe EntertainmentPublisher: Acclaim
Platforms: PlayStation
Year: 1997
This is the kind of stuff I live for; an objectively bad game, yet it draws you in all the same. This game is bizarre, janky, chaotic, terrible, and yet I actually spent nearly two straight hours playing it. I cannot say that about any previous atrocity I’ve covered yet, or even The Pantheon Saga. I’ve played good games on this list for less time. This is a game so fascinating that Acclaim themselves recognized it was bad, but had to release it due to contractual obligations. Acclaim recognized this game as bad.
The game sees the Fantastic 4+1 battle across a typical assortment of levels. She-Hulk joins the cast of this game, as she had been a member of the team in the comic book at a point after the Secret Wars event. She was never really on the team at the same time as Thing who she replaced, but she is for this game evidently.
Why do the Skrulls have the same proportions as a small child? Oh god, what have we done?
It becomes apparent just how odd this game is from the main menu when the free-style jazz music starts playing. It’s a hell of a vibe, honestly. And from there, it keeps delivering. The game once again uses pre-rendered graphics for just about everything, with the characters being made of chunky segments making everyone look like distended, bulging balloons fused together. It’s a look.
You steer your gangly limbs across the levels, and deliver some very janky fisticuffs to numerous enemies. It’s designed for co-op, and you can play it solo but I do not recommend it. In the options menu, there is something listed as ‘Drones’ with the option to turn them on. This is a little confusingly titled (drones? What the **** does that mean?) but this is the option to turn on AI controlled partners when you play solo. I don’t know why this isn’t just the standard way the game works, but it’s Fantastic 4 on the PlayStation; it somehow makes sense in how it doesn’t make sense.
You have two basic attack buttons, I guess being a light and a heavy attack; they both seem more or less the same for every character save for Sue and Johnny who shoot projectiles. Susan kinda rapid fires little bubbles with it, and for some reason leans back to an absurd degree when doing so?
Susan ‘Scoliosis Woman’ Storm.
You have two more attack buttons, being the ability to smack enemies either into or away from the screen into the background. This is such a weird thing to have, like…why? It does actually factor into the gameplay in a few ways, being required to fight some bosses or break down doors into powerup rooms, but it’s just such an interestingly odd mechanic to have. The character’s also have four ‘special’ moves you can do that use some energy. You hold down R2, and your first thought may be to use some of the face buttons to do each move as is now more or less gaming standard. Not in Fantastic 4; while holding down R2, you instead enter specific commands using the directional inputs. These vary from either being double forward inputs, or down inputs, to some really weird attempts at vertical half circles or something like ‘forward-back-up’. This jankiness aside, some of the moves are actually pretty fun, I can’t deny. Thing gets his classic handclap, Sue can turn invisible, Mr. Fantastic can throw grenades and shoot a comical laser pistol; some of them are inventive.
Shoot tentacle mutants with laser pistols. Kick tentacle mutants in the face with size 13 women’s boots. Lariat tentacle mutants with spiked stretchy fists.
The game just oozes janky soul. Between some levels you’ll be randomly teleported to a street to do a solo fight against other Marvel characters, including randomly Iceman from the X-Men for some reason. The loading screens are some sort of playable racing game where you’re a…something going around a track.
Why is this even happening?
The soundtrack, consisting entirely of hectic jazz drums and electric guitars, blares while you pound masses of molemen. The characters each have some little touches put into them; Reed’s dash animation his him taking a big, stretchy step forward, Susan rides on a force field platform when she’s jumping, She-Hulk is a good foot or so taller than everyone as a true gamma queen, there’s an announcer straight out of an arcade fighting game. Somewhere in here was an honest attempt at making something relatively fresh for its day I think, just held back by numerous bad decisions.
This game can be such chaos in co-op. Everything just blends together into a mess of uncanny character models and **** flying around.
The game is busted. There is no after-hit invincibility, and combined with the masses of enemies you commonly fight, this means you get stunlocked into oblivion frequently. Plenty of the enemies are also just straight up broken. A lot of them have easily spammable knockdown moves that can loop endlessly. The moleman monster who you have to throw rocks into the background to hit (and who’s also from the comics; the cover of Fantastic 4 #1) is a standout offender. He pounds the ground which knocks anyone down who’s not jumping, and does it so quickly and so relentlessly that I was got locked for like ten seconds. You can jump to dodge it, but the issue is he would use it just as I was getting up from the last one and unless I was like frame-perfect on the jump, I’d wake up into the next one.
Here Reed’s utilizing an intimidation technique; doing some weird stretchy **** with his neck.
The biggest main issue of the game is just how drab and boring the actual combat is. Things around it are fascinating in that surreal fever dream kinda way, but the actual gameplay is definitely not. You punch the enemies, sometimes use your special moves, get knocked around a whole lot; that’s about it.
This is something special for lovers of good-bad games. It’s terrible, but such a bizarre collection of decisions that you can’t help but become engrossed in it. Why were AI partners turned off by default? Why in the loading screen for the Skrull homeworld mission is the team called the ‘Fantasic Four’?
Score
1 Cosmic Ray out of 5 (objectively), 5 Cosmic Rays out of 5 (subjectively)
First games done and in the bag. This was such a strange starting lineup, with some very terrible games. The generation was not off to a good start with Marvel games quality wise, save for the Saturn ports of the Capcom games. But then again, Pantheon Saga and Fantastic 4 are both some of the most memorably bad games of this generation, honestly, so at least there’s something there. Oh, and Iron Man and X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal which is entirely forgettable compared to those far superior trash games.
What’s next in our journey? Well, let’s take a look at my file as I can’t remember off the top of my head. Probably another terrible game I think, but I do-
Oh ****. Jesus, it’s here. It’s here. Summer has come. Up next is going to be a first for this retrospective; a dedicated one-game article on the most nostalgic of fifth generation Marvel video games, Neversoft’s Spider-Man on the PlayStation and N64. I have such things to rant about.
Until next time, when we webswing through a whole lot of fog and fight a lot of low-poly henchmen with the same voice saying the same lines over and over again.
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