First up; Iron Man and XO Manowar in Heavy Metal, which is the longest game title yet.
Iron Man and XO Manowar in Heavy Metal
Year: 1996Publisher: Acclaim
Developer: Realtime Associates, Griptonite Games (Game Boy Version)
Platform: Game Boy, Game Gear
A very obscure crossover, Iron Man and XO Manowar in Heavy Metal sees Iron Man paired up with, believe it or not, XO Manowar. A character from Valiant Comics, a company founded in 1989 by the former Marvel editor of the time, the company has gone on to have a very interesting history. They started off as an underdog in the comic industry, having some successful series and characters but never reaching wide popularity. In 1994, they were sold to Acclaim Entertainment, which as far as I know is the first time a video game publisher and developer has ever bought a comic company. That of course led to the existence of this game, with it being published by Acclaim. What is Valiant up to nowadays? After a series of business buyouts and acquisitions, they are now setting multiple sales records, winning multiple Harvey Awards (the ‘Oscars’ of comic books) and having one of the best ‘glow ups’ a comic company can ask for. Valiant Comics, through Acclaim, actually have had a bunch of games you may not have realised are even based on Valiant characters; the Turok series and cult classic Shadow Man games are all Valiant adaptations, believe it or not.
How is Iron Man and XO Manowar in Heavy Metal on the Game Boy and Game Gear? Not as good as Turok, I’ll tell you that much.
You can choose to play as either the armoured avenger Iron Man, or the…whatever he is, XO Manowar. The game is a straight forward action platformer that sees you progress through a series of kinda bland levels and utilize some kind of jank controls to get to the end. The controls are simple, but suffer from that ‘loose’ feeling of lack of responsiveness that’s plagued many games before. By hitting up in the air, both characters can fly for a limited time which is kind of cool but is sort of hard to control. I had frequent issues where I would try to start flying only to not be able to for some reason, and would land on the ground again like a terrestrial locked loser. Both characters have a basic projectile attack that you can aim in multiple directions, but once again it’s pretty jank. You can crouch by hitting down to shoot a low projectile, but if you hit the attack button too quickly or even falter for a second and accidently hit diagonally downwards, your metal clad hero will instead remain standing and shoot diagonally downwards; it makes trying to dodge enemy fire and fire back a sort of hit and miss affair.
The weirdest control choice is the only melee attack, either a roundhouse kick from Iron Man or what I’m assuming is an upward sword swing by XO Manowar, not being tied to the attack button. Instead, you perform it by hitting up with no button press required. It’s frankly a little bizarre, and leads to many accidental uses of the attack, particularly if you’re trying to aim diagonally upwards to shoot something. Why is it like this? Who knows. You can also grab enemies when close to them, but I was never able to figure out what the exact command was and it seemed to happen randomly.
The graphics aren’t bad, with the sprites having a sort of stylized angular look to it. Iron Man’s torso has never been wider, I don’t think; he’s been bulking for sure.
There isn’t much more to say about this one. It’s just mediocre, really. It’s not unplayable, or so terrible I’m going to keep ragging on it like a certain other game we’ve covered, it’s just ‘meh’. Both versions of the game on the Game Gear and Game Boy are the exact same other than the usual of the Sega version being in colour, so choose your specific brand of mediocrity. There is also a version both on the Playstation and the Saturn which we’ll get to in the respective articles, being different enough to warrant a separate write-up; they have a combination of some ‘interesting’ pre-rendered 3D graphics, some powerups to collect and even some small differences between the two characters. Are they any good? You probably know the answer already.
Score
2 Arc Reactors out of 5.
X-Men: Mutant Academy
Year: 2000Publisher: Activision
Developer: Crawfish Interactive (Game Boy Colour Version)
Platform: Game Boy Colour
This is the Game Boy Colour port of the PlayStation 1 fighting game, which we will get to eventually; I can already tell you that it will be a much different score than this version (sorry, double spoilers). Fighting games were a fairly rare release on the original two Game Boy’s given the obvious technical limitations, with the biggest hurdle being only having two buttons. Did X-Men: Mutant Academy overcome that very large obstacle and produce a fun and playable handheld fighting game? Absolutely not, you already got spoiled; why did you ask that?
The face of the abyss.
The art’s actually not that bad, I just had to have a dramatic stinger there.
This game is atrocious. Just utterly terrible, almost to the extent of Uncanny X-Men (I haven’t mentioned it in awhile, I have a quota to fill) on the NES. The controls, despite only having two buttons to worry about, are barely responsive. I would attempt to do a jump attack by hitting the attack button as soon as I left the ground, and sometimes it would come out in time for me to hit my opponent before I’d land. Sometimes.
There are no special moves, so you’re left with just hitting your two buttons as quickly as you can. I think there was maybe a different kick or punch I’d sometimes do, but god knows I couldn’t figure out the input consistently.
Since there were no strategies as a result of characters having unique and fanciful special moves, I had to figure something out as I was looking for anything to avoid actually having to play the game. It didn’t take me long to develop an unbeatable strategy; just crouch in front of your opponent and mash the hell out of the punch button. It just utterly stun locks them every time. It would still take a solid 15 seconds of punching to defeat an opponent as damage is stupidly low in this game, which again doesn’t seem like it’s a long time until you’re doing it.
When you fill your ‘Rage’ meter you can hit both your buttons (only when you’re standing, not crouching as this game was not well programmed) to do something? Maybe it makes you stronger, I’m not sure as it seemed to wear off within three seconds before I could even get a chance to see what happened.
The game is just broken. It has nothing going for it, there is nothing exciting, no strategy or differences between characters, the controls are sluggish, the graphics are just ‘okay’, and it’s just something that should never have been released really. It did succeed at one thing, however; being the second worst game I’ve encountered so far. That means something, give credit where credit is due.
Score
½ X-Gene out of 5.
Spider-Man
Year: 2000Publisher: Activision
Developer: Neversoft
Platform: Game Boy Colour
The handheld port of the spectacular PlayStation and N64 classic Spider-Man (that’s not a spoiler, that’s just foreshadowing something inevitable), this is another game I didn’t even know existed until doing this article. Maybe because search engines constantly confused it for the Sam Raimi movie tie-in game on the Game Boy Advance. Is it as good as the PS1 game?
Why are there always random animals in retro Spider-Man games? Wait, like 90% of his rogues gallery are animal themed now that I think about it. Maybe these games were onto something there.
It sees, get this, Spider-Man being framed for a crime by a group of six-ish villains. You know what I’m going to say; ‘don’t fix what ain’t broke’. This Game Boy Colour version does differ from the console versions with an entirely new little intro pre-frame job of the webhead investigating an explosion in Dr. Connor’s lab. It also differs from the console versions by having sort of an open world level design with the city serving as a hub of sorts, and sees you have to navigate to specific areas to progress the game.
Something it has going for it is actual functional and responsive controls. The jump does have a bit of an animation before Spider-Man actually takes off, but once you get used to it it’s not really a big issue. You can crawl all over walls, shoot web balls, do a wicked dive kick, swing overhead and catch some crooks so it’s got all the bases covered.
The graphics too deserve a mention, being really well done. Colours pop like a comic book, and sprites have good detail and some really good animation to them.
Honestly, I’m just impressed with the fact this is a Game Boy Colour game. It blows everything previously out of the water, and makes the whole Amazing Spider-Man trilogy on the OG Game Boy look like garbage, though that’s not hard to do.
That generic goon never stood a chance against the Spider-Foot-Dive.
The game is very hard. Enemies deal a lot of damage when hitting you, and there’s a lot of them. The bosses particularly will prove to be very difficult, until you learn how to do the web ball, that is. My first attempt, I made it to the subway system before I was eventually slapped with the game over screen. You have limited continues, but there is a password system so death isn’t quite the end. This mitigates the difficulty somewhat, and unlike many a previous game we’ve covered so far the difficulty can be dealt with through the age old adage of ‘get good’, so it’s not so difficult as to lower the score- just something I wanted to bring up.
I didn’t keep going once I got a little bit past the Subway section, but that’s due to having maybe about 53 other Marvel games to play ahead of me. I will actually come back and play this game again for sure. I haven’t even gotten to the leveling system which sees you learn new moves and improve your stats as you defeat generic thugs, but I’ll leave something for you to discover (also, I haven’t gotten that far yet).
Definitely play this, it’s pretty impressive and has some serious potential.
Score
3 ½ Thwips out of 5.
Blade
Year: 2000Publisher: Activision
Developer: HAL Corporation, Avit Inc. (Game Boy Colour version)
Platform: Game Boy Colour
I love the original Blade movie. It is such a perfect specimen of late 90’s action movies and fashion decisions, and that opening scene in the vampire nightclub is absolutely iconic. That grungy look to everything, the industrial electronic soundtrack, the career defining performance by Wesley Snipes, the leather-on-leather ensembles; iconic, man. This tie-in movie game, also having a version on the PlayStation 1 so we’ll also see that down the line, is an interesting one for the fact it came out two years after the movie did in 2000. A fundamental point of the licensed game model is that the game should probably be out at the same time as the movie it’s based on for peak relevancy. I tried to find some information on why there was a two year gap, but believe it or not there isn’t much in the way of info out there for this forgotten tie-in game on either console.
I’m sure some of you may have seen who’s listed as a developer for this game, and either gotten excited or confused. This game is made by HAL Corporation, which isn’t HAL Laboratory, the creators of the Kirby series and the first two Smash Bros. games. They are two separate companies, but HAL Corporation was formed by the original president of HAL Laboratory to just further confuse things. I cannot tell you how hard it was to find information on this, when every search would only turn up information on HAL Laboratory. Anyway, little trivia information aside, let’s get into the game itself.
This game honestly surprised me a little bit, though maybe not to the extent as Spider-Man. It sees you as the titular ‘day-walker’ himself as you head out to clear the streets of the vampire menace, choosing from three levels you can tackle in any order. Each level is broken up into three main gameplay modes; a side-scrolling beat ‘em up, a sword dueling boss fight, or a stationary shooting gallery. The beat ‘em up and shooting gallery modes are probably the best parts, as the boss fights are less than fun.
The beat ‘em up sections see you bare handedly assault various vampire enemies with your two button arsenal. One button attacks, of course, and the other isn’t the jump that you’d reasonably expect it to be; instead, it's a block button, and the game's biggest surprise is it has a parry mechanic. If you block just as an enemy hits you, you’ll hear a chime letting you know that you’ve parried and if you hit the attack button you’ll unleash a highly damaging series of elbows and back fists that will seemingly instantly kill any enemy. This to me is the earliest example of a parry type mechanic I've encountered in a game, so give it some credit.
Your array of moves isn’t plentiful given that you only have one real button to work with, but there’s some cool stuff hidden in it. If you hit an enemy enough times, they’ll enter into a sort of dazed stun state. Depending on how much health they have left, if you hit the block button next to them, you’ll either side kick them away or, in my favourite move, pull out a stake and give them the final pinch of vampire death. There’s also a particularly beefy feeling spin kick move that once I figured out proved to be the redeath of many a damned soul.
The shooting gallery mode is also decent fun, seeing Blade gunning down numerous enemies as they leap in and out of the fight. You can shoot in the foreground and the background, and it proved to be a decent challenge once things started flying at you from all sides and both planes. Like I said, it kinda surprised me honestly.
Unfortunately, the game's worst sections are the sword fighting boss encounters. They’re just not that fun compared to the other sections, and just badly designed. Each time you fight the same winged type of enemy, only one of them has fire attacks and the third one has wind powers I guess. You have only a few different basic sword slashes, and a dashing slice for offense and your usual block for defence. The issue is the bosses are just straight up cheap. The boss of the easiest starting level of ‘Enemy Base’ (I guess it was some sort of warehouse?) would routinely trap me in a corner and use this move where he rapidly punches for a few seconds. I would get knocked down, then get back up directly into the punches before I could even block it. This cost me many a life until I feel like I just got lucky and managed to defeat him by more or less doing the same thing to him. Even worse than that was the fire one, who immediately from the beginning of the stage proceeded to jump into the air and spam an amount of fireballs that would make Johnny Storm say “dude, chill”. It was just nonstop, really. I found an item hidden in the ‘Enemy Base’ level that made them do little damage, but even with that they would still stun me if they collided. Most of the fight was spent with me blocking in the corner as he would repeatedly take to the air and launch ceaseless fireballs. Not the funnest experience. There are only a few of them, and they can eventually be powered through, but they are definitely the worst part of the game.
Are these things even vampires? Why am I fighting them?
Overall, the game does a really good job capturing the feel of the character. From the impactful feeling karate moves in the beat ‘em up stages, to his stoic sass in the few dialogues you encounter- it really does make you feel like you’re playing Blade. Also of note is the fact that it’s a fairly violent Game Boy game, as enemies you defeat explode into blood as their head twirls away. Just beautiful.
Remember, the only good vamp is a dead vamp, exploding into red pixels.
Similar to Spider-Man, you can also level up various attributes of Blade by heading back to your home base after a mission. Not a bad game all things considered, and definitely a neat surprise I encountered, having no knowledge of it ahead of time. You know what? These last two games were pretty good, and filled me with some optimism going forward; maybe there are some more actually good licensed Marvel games. I have a new found hope, particularly for my sanity as Mutant Academy did a bit of a number on it.
What's next?
Score
3 Katanas out of 5.
X-Men: Mutant Wars
Year: 2000Publisher: Activision
Developer: HAL Corporation, Avit Inc.
Platform: Game Boy Colour
Godamnit, why'd I have to comedically get my hopes up before going into this game. It's almost like it was a planned bit.
Why are the X-Men so cursed with terrible games?
You play as five members of the X-Men from the 90’s classic team; Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Iceman, and Gambit. Everyone except for Wolverine has a projectile attack, and you switch between the members through hitting select along with a button direction, or just select to go back to Wolverine. Logan regenerates health obviously while the other characters don’t so the game is really just using each other character as a pool of health before switching to another one or back to Wolverine when they're all dead.
The game opens with Xavier telling you that he’s sensed some robots or something in the wilds of Canada, so apparently that screenshot above is in Canada if you couldn't tell by looking at it. We’re well known for our jungles and robots. The game is just silly, for lack of a better word. The enemies don’t ever stop spawning, and just constantly harass you. The flying robots are the ****ing worst, I swear on Chris Claremont’s good name. They just keep coming at you without end, and they have a very annoying habit of constantly flying to the specific blind spot you can’t hit them with projectiles at every time you hit the attack button.
They don’t stop. They keep coming at you without fear, without end. Always swooping, the swooping robots are always swooping and diving and swooping. And the grabby green guys, always grabbing and reaching.
I think this game actually affected my brain.
In a very bizarre move, just about every other enemy you defeat drops a heart that restores your health which just doesn’t really make much sense; why so commonly? What's the point really. You have to find a key in each stage for no reason other than it's a video game thing to do, and then you can fight the boss. Sabertooth went down like a sack of potatoes, which is in contrast to the never ending barrage of enemies I endured getting to him.
After beating him, you’re brought to a graveyard as apparently ‘more robots’. The enemies here include undead ghouls? Are they robots? Is this even connected to Magento or whatever, or did we just stumble into necromantic rituals at random?
Why?
The other new enemy on this stage very quickly became the bane of my existence, and the target of my immense hate; the ‘axe guy’. It’s an ‘axe guy move’ to attack from off screen before you can even react and take off about half of someone’s health.
Please, X-Men: Mutant Wars, enough. I can’t take anymore swooping or axe-ing or grabbing.
I quickly had enough of this game. Don’t play it, don’t look at it, it’s almost Uncanny X-Men; it’s at least on par with X-Men: Mutant Academy. Why did they have it so rough in the third generation?
Score
½ X-Gene out of 5.
Spider-Man 2: The Sinister Six
Year: 2001Publisher: Activision
Developer: Torus Games
Platform: Game Boy Colour
This is a sequel to Spider-Man on the Game Boy Colour. Not Spider-Man on the N64 and PlayStation, but specifically the GBC version, which is rather strange to say the least. The sequel to the console versions, Spider-Man 2: Enter: Electro, would come 5 months after this game was released which raises more questions.
The game is more or less the same as the first Spider-Man, following the same control scheme and graphical style. What has changed is the previous pseudo open hub world thing going on, and is instead a simple linear experience. Each level sees you have to get through the level and do something specific to progress past it, such as flicking three switches to open a gate in the first level or defeat a specific enemy who’s holding a key. Speaking of enemies, they are a little strange. Instead of normal goons, you’re fighting amusement themed enemies in the first couple of Coney Island stages which means you’re going to be kicking a lot of mooks in bear costumes and clowns for some reason. It got even weirder in the next stage set in the harbour when you’re fighting hooded dark fantasy witches and, uh, karate bob cut sailor women?
It’s really nice of the Sinister Six to not think about gender when hiring henchmen. They’re a very progressive and inclusive employer, apparently.
As you can tell from the title, Spidey is once again up against the Sinister Six in a set-up that is maybe starting to get played out a little bit. This time, they kidnap Aunt May while originally looking to grab Peter Parker, thinking he could lead them to Spider-Man. Oh, those silly ignorant super-villains.
The game isn’t terrible, but once again just fine. The graphics are once again very well done, being more or less the same as Spider-Man and it has the same smooth sprite animations. I think honestly just losing the pacing and hub feeling of the first game is what hurt it the most, as now it’s just in the same territory of the many previous linear side scrolling Spider-Man games instead of being something relatively unique.
I breezed through the stages without much issue while playing on the normal difficulty, taking out Mysterio, a swarth of clowns and some regular goon type guys and eventually battling Sandman and giving him the old unbeatable strategy of ‘web ball, then run up and kick him and then run away’.
It’s an unbeatable strategy, really. Until you run out of web fluid.
After defeating him, he tells you where the Vulture is located, which is in the World Trade Center. Not touching that one, keep in mind this game came out in May of 2001.
Is this a henchman, or is Spider-Man actually just beating up World Trade Center security guards? Unclear, but they shot first, I swear.
It’s overall just serviceable, a ‘worksman’ Spider-Man game. I would definitely recommend the first Spider-Man game over this one, but you probably won’t hate this.
Score
2 ½ Thwips out of 5.
The second part is now complete, leaving us with only 5 more games to tackle next time. I think this may be on average the worst part yet, considering the utter shoveled out garbage of X-Men: Mutant Wars and the Game Boy version of Mutant Academy. Why’s it always the X-Men? They just can’t catch a break in the third generation.
Next time, we’re covering the final 5: starting with, damnit, another X-Men game; Wolverine’s Rage on the Game Boy Colour. Of the next 5, 4 are X-Men titles. History has so far shown us that there’s a pretty good chance it’s going to be rough.
Until next time, true believers.
Last edited:
