Like every child of the 90’s obsessed with superheroes, I would routinely browse the shelves at my local Canadian Blockbuster or local game store, ‘GAMES- BUY, SELL, TRADE’ (seriously, that place was great despite not having a name) and often I would be searching for something specific. A bounty that I would quickly bring to the counter in anticipation of something that even back then I knew would likely be disappointing; the Marvel Comics logo on a game case.
Though the ‘licensed game’ is nearly an extinct species now, back in the good ol’ days they were everywhere. Movie tie-in games abounded across multiple systems, often with entirely different developers on each system that ended up with drastically different end products. The other side of the licensed game world; superheroes. Superhero games were everywhere and had been since the dawn of the home video game market. The first one dated all the way back to 1979 on the Atari 2600 with Superman. Featuring the cutting edge graphical power of the console, the game was released to much critical acclaim. Touted as ‘the greatest Atari game’ at the time and winner of Video magazine’s Game of the Year in its ‘Arkies’ category, it paved the way for more licensed superhero games to follow.
Thank you, Clark Kent; he flew across non-scrolling screens so later games could walk across mostly scrolling screens.
The point of this article isn’t about Superman or the Atari 2600, however; so I digress.
I was long from being born in time to play Superman, but I was born into the boom of the superhero game market in the 90s. Games were flying onto shelves from a multitude of different companies, some who would go on to become industry giants such as Acclaim, Vicarious Visions and even Blizzard, surprisingly.
Seriously, Blizzard co-developed Justice League: Task Force on the SNES. You learn something new every day.
That is to say I’m well versed in the field of the retro superhero game. I rented some of the games on this list a dozen times easily or owned them. I know that they are 80% garbage. I was there to see the first copies of Superman 64 land on the shelves of GAMES- BUY, SELL, TRADE in a truly historic moment, and honestly that game is just scratching the surface of the shovelware; for every Superman 64, there were easily two more LJN titles on the SNES of equal quality.
I came to the idea of this ongoing, episodic mini-review series for a bunch of different reasons; I’m probably slightly insane, I have nothing better to do than make myself play some classic shovelware, and I want to document and compare the quality of the time honoured licensed superhero games across the various retro generations. To accomplish this, I have devised this system.
As you can see by the title, I have narrowed it down to games licensed by Marvel Comics (despite me already mentioning two DC titles. Oops?). This is because there are far more Marvel games than there are DC titles for whatever reason, and I’ll come clean and admit some personal fanboy bias. In addition, if I were to just bite the bullet and do both companies' games this series would be far longer and it’s already going to be long. Perhaps in the future I’ll visit the other juggernaut of the comic industry, maybe DC has some serious gold on their side of the street. But for now, the scope of this series is planned to be from the so-called third generation of video game consoles and ending with the sixth generation, so from the NES straight through to the PS2 era, covering from the late 80’s to early-mid 2000’s. The actual game count within each article isn't going to be constant, but I'm aiming for as much consistency as I can get from article to article and without making each article a novella (the first draft of this article alone was about 17 pages!). Some will be split into multiple parts such as this one, others I may be able to cram into one, we’ll see.
The amount of games involved, you may ask? Why, only a little over 60 or so by my estimate which depends on what you qualify as a ‘different game’. So this is clearly an entirely sane idea, as you can see.
Why only starting from the NES, considering I mentioned an Atari game earlier? I feel that the pre-NES games would honestly not have much to cover, and I say that with all due respect to the second generation consoles. When someone thinks of a ‘retro superhero game’, they usually think of something from the third gen on. I will give an honourable mention to the Marvel Questprobe games from the early 80s on the various home computer systems, so maybe at some point in the future I will visit those; they combine my love of superheroes and obsessive text based puzzle games which really isn't a common crossover believe it or not.
In the case of games being on different systems they will be treated as one entry if there are little to no differences across the versions, or have their own entry if it is in fact a different enough game. This isn't going to be too common until we get to the sixth generation.
Well, that’s the system.
I’m not prepared for this.
Okay, let’s begin. First up; the third generation. We’re starting with the NES and the Sega Master System. You may ask, “dude, why isn’t the Atari 7800 on here”? Believe it or not, there were no Marvel Comics licensed games on the Atari 7800 which is strange to me considering how well both the previously mentioned Superman and the also successful Spider-Man did on the 2600. Who knows, maybe Atari didn’t want to deal with spandex anymore.
With that out of the way, let’s begin with the first game: The Uncanny X-Men on the NES.
Uncanny X-Men
Year: 1989Publisher: LJN
Developer: Unknown
Platform: NES
Jesus Christ this was the first game out of the gate. The whole thing is cursed now. Uncanny X-Men is atrocious. It's a hate crime perpetrated on humans by Magneto and his Brotherhood, it's the only thing I can think of to explain how this was made and released. The graphics are dull and lack any particular sense of colour or flavour. The character sprites are badly coloured and I'm pretty sure copy and pasted; Storm is clearly just a recolour of Nightcrawler, and Nightcrawler is like a teal colour? The enemies are bizarre and unidentifiable. Why am I being assaulted by bubbles?
Bigger question: why do some shrink or blink or whatever it is that they’re doing?
Even worse than the bubbles are the worms, man. The worms. What are these? Why am I fighting worms and blobs?
Seriously, what are these? What am I looking at?
The controls are somehow both too tight and yet too loose at the same time, it's hard to describe. They're oversensitive but stiff, and the simple act of turning in a direction feels like you have heavy momentum behind you. It's incredibly easy to get bounced by an enemy into a never ending chain of other enemies due to the controls being as unwieldy as they are.
Predictable hit detection? Don't even think about it. You'll miss enemies despite being practically inside them, and enemies will clip you without even touching your sprite. Things just ‘happen’ in this game, for no discernable reason. Take Colossus for example. His special ability so to speak, at least from what I've gathered, is just that he has a lot of health which is a fair ability when you're made of organic steel. However, sometimes this seemed very impactful and I would take a multitude of hits from the never ending enemies and be fine. Other times, I would take only a few hits and then die somehow; it's not clear why, considering they were the same type of enemy in both scenarios. It's just one of those ‘Uncanny X-Men on the NES’ things.
After starting up the game, choosing one player or two player mode and choosing one of five stages (one is just a practise room) you then select two of the six available X-Men largely based on the lineup at the time in the comic books of Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Iceman, Colossus, and Nightcrawler. In single player mode, the AI controls your other character and you can switch to them with select. Each character has an attack with three of the characters having melee attacks where they do some sort of…kick? and the other three having projectile attacks. Some have other special abilities they can use at the expense of draining their health, like Iceman and Storm being able to fly by holding the jump button down. It never seemed to accomplish much for me as enemies still damaged me when they bumped into me and I still took damage from floor hazards, so I don't know what else to say about that. Nightcrawler can walk through objects by holding the jump button, but since he has the lowest health of any character and using the ability drains his health, I found I would activate it for maybe five seconds before I would die. Very cool, I know whenever I think of Nightcrawler I think of how cool it is that he teleports then dies right after. Why is his power even walking through objects? I get it's an NES game and showing a teleport effect could be difficult, but I think there’s something else they could have done for the poor German.
Each stage is a scrolling screen, and the objective is not readily apparent. You have to navigate through the maze-like level while dodging the constantly spawning enemies as they bounce and slap you absolutely silly all over the place, go through ‘door’ tiles which are usually hard to spot amongst the rest of the environment and find a floppy disk on each stage You then fight a boss character from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants then have to retread to the levels’ first screen to escape before a bomb goes off which I guess was planted by Magneto. I don't know where Magneto is getting these bombs from, it doesn't matter. I like how the X-Men seemingly don't attempt to disarm the bomb at all, they just run, which is a reasonable course of action. Let's just hope there were no civilians in the blast zone, I guess.
A couple civilian deaths are probably worth destroying all these springs and spiders. These goddamn springs and spiders, why are we getting attacked by springs and spiders? Truly everything hates and fears mutants.
The objective seems easy enough, but impossible to achieve, factoring in how much the game hates you. It fights you in every second you spend desperately attempting to escape the onslaught of constantly bouncing balls and frogs and worms and square shaped things before getting smashed into a gate and dying, and it fights you at the basic level of moving your ugly and deformed sprite across a bizarre backdrop. This game just hates you, and you’ll hate it for being a complete waste of time.
I managed to get to the floppy disk once in the city stage after probably about 30 some attempts, then died to a random bubble. I think this could be one of the worst games I've personally played, and I've played some garbage; at the very least, it's a contender for the worst NES game and that's saying a lot as there's a lot of competition.
Score
0 X-Genes out of 5.
I'd give it lower if possible. Seriously.
Silver Surfer
Year: 1990Publisher: Arcadia Systems
Developer: Software Creations
Platform: NES
This game holds a fairly infamous reputation for being a contender for the hardest NES game, and I would say that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not far off. This game is hard for sure, but unlike that godforsaken last game it is actually, I would say, a good game. The controls are perfectly responsive and the movement feels snappy and tight, and there's much else you can ask for in a scrolling shooter.
The graphics are good, and the Surfer himself looks detailed as do the backgrounds. The music deserves a mention, and there's some pretty good tracks in here- I particularly enjoyed the music on Firelord’s stage. The game does feature for some of its enemies the usual NES types of random shapes or animals, but I'm not going to knock points off of the game for something it didn't start. Also, it’s not Uncanny X-Men so it gets a pass.
Norinn Rad, the Silver Surfer; wielder of the power cosmic and coated in an unknown and indestructible material who wanders through collapsing suns and exploding quasars in lonely solitude- here he is facing off against a fish, and the fish stands a good chance of winning. Completely accurate.
The game follows the usual shooter formula of enemies dropping powerups to collect, from secondary attack turrets that also shoot bullets in controllable directions to increasing the damage your shots do to enemies. This is the thing with this game; un-upgraded you are a complete wimp, and that fish will laugh at you. But once you get some additional turrets and all the firepower increases you can now down enemies like they're nothing as you blaze across the levels. But, following the other genre convention, when you die you lose all your power ups and are reset back to being a weakling amateur surfer. Essentially if you die near the end of the stage, I'd just recommend restarting the level.
You can choose to take on any of the six stages in any order which is a blessing for a game about essentially stage memorization as you can practise any stage at any time.
Your mileage of this will come from how willing you are to put up with some punishment. The difficulty comes from not just the plentiful enemies, which there are, but also the enemies' movement patterns which can best be described as “a chaotic mess” on top of that. You're also dealing with a lot of dodging of the various obstacles in your way as you navigate your large surfboard through tight quarters, and it adds up to you staring at the image of a sad Silver Surfer frequently after you get knocked off your board.
It's a very effective death screen, I mean just look at the guy. He's so sad. Why’d you get hit by that fish and make him sad? Why did you make the Surfer cry?
As for it being the hardest NES game, I don't think it's to the extent of others on the console. Don't get me wrong, the game is hard for sure but it's a surmountable level of difficulty as it comes down to memorization on top of getting your power ups as fast as possible. Once you have the correct path around enemies and have the stage layouts down, the game is not really any harder than others. Unlike other games on the console, Silver Surfer offers unlimited continues after your stock of lives is depleted, meaning eventually it is possible to brute force your way through the game. With that in mind, I think the game is much easier than something like Ghosts ‘n Goblins or even the infamous Battletoads. I am the first to admit I am terrible at scrolling shooters, and I was able to clear a stage in maybe a little over an hour of effort which isn't much to ask of a game.
Overall, I would actually recommend this for fans of hard games or dedicated ‘SHMUP’ players. Not the review some were expecting I'm sure, but I can recognize when something is badly designed, like Uncanny X-Men, or simply a challenging game. Also, I'm still entertained by the image of the Surfer getting knocked off his board by a fish and being sad about it. That alone makes this game fine.
Score
3 Galactus Heads out of 5.
The Punisher
Year: 1990Publisher: LJN
Developer: Beam Software
Platform: NES
Finally, some good food. This is the first game I have some advanced firsthand knowledge of, as I spent many a time playing this as a young lad. Luckily, it's a pretty good game.
You control Frank Castle, aka the Punisher as he goes to town ‘punishing’ (aka shooting) some comically exaggerated criminals. It is essentially a rail shooter as Frank can only move across the bottom of the screen to dodge enemy fire as the screen automatically scrolls, and you are locked in place once you begin firing.
Prepare for punishment, criminal saxophone player.
The difficulty comes from juggling dodging enemy fire while also firing back. You are going to take some hits, but luckily the Punisher’s a big boy and you can take a good amount of bullets before dying. Enemies drop power ups at a frequent rate which you pick up by shooting them; Frank's just that good. Power ups include machine guns with limited ammo that shoot much faster than your default gun, health packs to heal you of course, and grenades or missiles launchers you can fire to clear multiple enemies at once. Occasionally you can also find body armour which increases your maximum health, or 1-Ups in the form of the Punisher skull logo. You can also find power ups through shooting various things in the background such as garbage cans and windows. I feel like indiscriminately ventilating parked cars and shooting people’s windows out probably isn't something the Punisher would do, but the game is fun so don't even worry about it.
Honestly, I want to give credit to the developers for sticking with a simple concept for a simple character. Many other licensed games would attempt something maybe more ambitious, like Uncanny X-Men that I can't stop rightfully trashing, and fail due to either the limitations of the system or just bad design choices. This game though? You’re the Punisher. You have a gun. Shoot the enemies, every garbage can and building awning before they shoot you. Simple. I like how the reticule actually experiences some recoil when you fire, making it feel pretty good considering it's an NES game, and your bullets leave little tiny 8-bit bullet hole textures on things. Small details of course, but they add up.
Jesus Frank, you know several super humans. Where did that even come from, man?
The graphics are good, featuring large sprites that lets them have a good level of detail. The backgrounds are well done, having a good range of colours and being distinct enough that you can tell what you're looking at which is always nice. I will say that the boss battles are a little lazy as most of them have simple solid colour backgrounds, but the rest of the levels make up for it.
Controls are perfect, and your reticule controls great considering it's on a control pad. I think it's aided by some forgiving hit detection, but it's not so egregiously overtuned that it feels too easy. The hit detection on Punisher is well done as well and you never get hit by shots that never should have connected. The game isn't a cake walk as the amount of return fire coming at you is plentiful, but the game isn't ‘NES difficult’ by any means; keep up the fire on the enemies, duck and weave and always be looking for the fairly generous power ups and you should be fine.
Definitely recommend checking this one out. Punishment has never felt so good.
Score
4 Uzis out of 5.
Wolverine
Year: 1991Publisher: LJN
Developer: Software Creations
Platform: NES
Wolverine is the best there is at what he does, and what he does is desperately attempt to not get hit by bubbles and dudes with harpoon guns. Why's it always bubbles? Why have both games that have had Wolverine in them so far had bubbles as deadly enemies, and why are they sentient and possess the single-minded goal of destroying Wolverine?
I assume the answer to why bubbles are everywhere is probably ‘development costs’, but I'm going to pretend that it's instead something nefarious perpetuated by the publisher LJN.
There's something I need to knock points off for right off the bat. By hitting select, you can pop Logan's claws which by itself could be a small cool detail. Of course there would be no point in ever not using them, but that's what the issue is; every attack with the claws drains your health and if your health gets low enough you can't use the claws at all. Why’s it like this? Why do they hurt him when he uses them? It's just a fundamentally fascinating thing to me that someone could miss the entire point of the character like that. If you're making a Wolverine game and at any point you say out loud in the office “this is great, but how do we make it so you can't use the claws all the time” you've already failed, just go home.
Outside of that grievous design mistake, the game is just kind of bland. It's not unplayable, the controls are fine enough and the objective is the simple task of making it to the end of a level. The graphics are fairly well done and Wolverine has some decent animation to him. It's not terribly difficult other than one aspect which breaks video game conventions; whenever you get hit in most games, you have a temporary period of invulnerability so as to not get into a situation where you lose all your health as something is inside your character sprite. In Wolverine on the NES, there is no such thing. If you ever touch an enemy, such as the teleporting DEVO members you encounter throughout the game, you will rapidly lose health for every second they are touching you. For that reason alone the game is hard, as one bad move can easily make you lose 80% of your health.
Teleporting in like they're invaders from planet Venus.
There isn't really much to say other than that. Just a nondescript NES platformer, but at least it's semi-competent. Other than the goddamn claws. Seriously, it's like a litmus test for game designers; ask them to make a Wolverine game, and see if any of them mention holding the claws back somehow and if so, don’t listen to them. It would be like an Iron Man game without being able to fly, who wants that.
I sincerely hope that wasn’t unintentional foreshadowing for later.
Score
2 ½ SNIKTs out of 5.
Check out the next part coming soon. How will the third generation end for the Marvel superheroes? Will there be some hidden gems? Or some obvious garbage most likely starring Spider-Man and the Sinis- sorry, spoilers. You'll have to tune in next time to find out.
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