Once again, for the fifth time, we are on the dawning of a new age; a new epoch, and a new console of cape**** of the Marvel persuasion to play through. We’ve gone through the primitive 8-bit home consoles, the even more primitive 8-bit handhelds, the arcade games (hell yeah), and finished the 16-bit home consoles with the last article series. Here’s the running quality tally, averaged out for for each generation from all of it’s review scores out of 5; the 8-bit home consoles had an average game score of 2, the 8-bit handhelds also had an average of 2, the arcade games had an average game score of 4, and the 16-bit consoles had an average of 3.
What console are we journeying through this time? Only the great 32-bit beast of a handheld, the Game Boy Advance, aka the greatest handheld console; fight me. The GBA is something I’m personally incredibly nostalgic for as I absolutely love this beautiful multiple colour option'd creature. It was the first console I ever got in the same year it was released, with me opening up the semi-transparent fuschia model on Christmas 2001. Thanks, Santa. I remember getting it going Christmas day and playing the one game I got with it; Rayman Advance. I hated it. Sorry, Rayman fans.
Oddly enough, I only played one of these Marvel GBA games growing up which is a little bizarre for some obvious reasons. Which game? Coincidentally, it’s in this very article. I’m not sure why I only played one of them back in the day; I was well into my (still ongoing) superheroes phase by 2001. Probably had something to do with my finances being entirely carried by my monthly allowance then, which obviously didn’t cover a whole lot of games and I’d usually save it up for something on our PS1 instead. That, and the absolutely stacked line-up of GBA games; I was too busy playing Revenge of the Sith and Golden Sun and Metroid: Zero Mission and Minnish Cap and Aria of Sorrow and Mario and Luigi and Mega Man Zero or Battle Network and- you get the idea. There was just no time or money to play something like the GBA Ultimate Alliance, and that’s the one bit of foreshadowing you’re going to get.
This is also the era of Activision, with this now (in)famous company getting exclusive publishing rights of Spider-Man and X-Men games in 1998, but also publishing essentially every other Marvel game even outside of those characters.
WIth all that rambling out of the way, let’s begin with the first Marvel game on the GBA; Spider-Man: Mysterio’s Menace.
Spider-Man: Mysterio’s Menace
Developer: Vicarious VisionsPublisher: Activision
Year: 2001
Ah, first game and the first taste of the now standard Marvel game mediocrity. It’s also apparently the third game in the Vicarious Visions Spider-Man trilogy, with the other two being the PS1 games (I cannot wait until we get there; that's truly the last bit of foreshadowing you're going to get).
Mysterio’s Menace isn’t really a bad game, just the usual kinda bland action-platformer with some awkward controls. They’re responsive at least, if not maybe a little stiff feeling with the movement, but it’s mainly the general gameplay design that carries the spirit of meh in its artificial heart. It’s also just kind of a slog to play, feeling rather slow.
The story opens with Peter Parker talking to MJ on his early 2000s cellphone. You see, MJ has gotten some new fish and they don’t have a fishbowl! The horror. She tasks Peter with getting one, then some Spider-Man stuff happens, you know how it goes. I can already assume where the whole fishbowl set-up there is going to end given which villain the game is named after, and I mean it’s a decently funny if played out joke. Just the cold open to “please get me a fishbowl” was a strange one to say the least.
First world problems.
Control wise it’s your bog standard affair; you have your attackin’ button and your web-shootin’ button, and can in fact swing from a thread while overhead. You jump across platforms, avoid saw blades and oddly detached fire textures; the usual.
The game has you choose from a batch of three initial levels centered around a specific boss, then each of those has another follow up level where you take them down for good. You can also collect power-ups like Mega Man style web refill canisters and special Spider-suits which I guess would come into play later, as of course I did not play through the entire game; an hour and ten minutes was enough for me. I like the game focusing on some underutilized Spidey villains, like Hammerhead and- holy ****, is that Big Wheel?
I take back everything I said. 10/10, Big Wheel’s in it. Masterpiece. He’s just a guy who rides a really big wheel.
Here’s where the slog and pronounced sigh come in; the game just isn’t that fun to play. Enemies are weirdly agile compared to you, the person with super-agility, where they can attack then quickly move away before you can attack back or close the distance. They have this frankly really frustrating thing where they move just fast enough to dodge your attacks by just walking forward through you, then turning around and doing it again when you try to chase them. I constantly felt like I was struggling to land attacks on the far too slippery enemies. I also lost many a life from the various goons and henchmen edge guarding platforms like its EVO grand finals for Smash Bros Melee; they are vicious and grotesquely effective monsters at it, man. There’s also the charger enemies who often barge in from offscreen, to the point where they often jump off of platforms into certain death as they’re just so bloodthirsty that they lose their own sense of self-preservation upon the merest glance of red and blue footie pajamas.
“It’s Spider-Man, gotta get ‘em!” the goon said to no one, as he launched himself with all the strength he could muster before he met only the sweet embrace of death.
Your attacks aren’t terribly unusable, there’s just nothing terribly exciting about them. You don’t have an easily usable attack to close distance. There is a running kick, but you have to be walking forward for a good two seconds or so for it to fly out and often enemies were far too close (and constantly moving through me) for me to be able to use it. There’s also an uppercut I was able to land once maybe, as to call it slow would be a little understated. The best moves I discovered were a jumping spin kick by hitting up-forward and the attack button, and a sort of stomping move you can drop on enemies from above with when you’re ceiling-crawling.
Graphically, the game is actually pretty good for a first year GBA game. The models are fine and animate well, and the backgrounds are pretty diverse across the stages and have good colour and flavour put into them. I particularly like the nightclub stage where you have to rescue hostages across some differently styled and coloured screens and hallways, including a central room with a giant light ball type thing going on which probably housed some sick parties.
Overall, there’s far worse games. If the game just had some faster gameplay, with some more exciting and better designed hand-to-hand combat I think it could have been a more solid experience.
Score
2 ½ Thwips out of 5.
X-Men: Reign of Apocalypse
Developer: Digital EclipsePublisher: Activision
Year: 2001
Oh, I know kid Octopus probably would have loved this game. What does grown man(child) Octopus think of it? Why, I think it’s pretty neat.
Reign of Apocalypse is a 2D beat ‘em up that sees four members of the X-Men attempt to find their way home after some shenanigans happen involving their warp portal that they have in the Blackbird, evidently. They are transported to a ever so slightly different dimension where some of their allies are now evil, and so begins the button mashing and special move spamming.
You have your basic attack, a sort of special attack that knocks enemies back, and of course if you hit both those buttons together you’ll perform an invincible attack that drains a bit of your health. Each of the four characters can do a dash to cover a bit of ground, and also has another special move done with a quarter circle input; Cyclops and Storm shoot a projectile that launches enemies into the air, while Wolverine and Rogue do a dash attack that also knocks enemies into the air. Character’s also have a sort of ‘super move’ you can do once you beat up enough enemies that seemingly instantly kills anything lower than a boss, and very strongly damages the bosses.
In-between stages, you can also assign points you gain towards one of three different character stats; your mutant power, which I’m guessing affects the damage of your various specials, and attack strength and vitality which should be obvious. It’s nothing overly game-changing, but nice nonetheless.
Points for comic book accurate Wolverine; he’s actually a midget. I’ve always found Logan’s lady killer status in the comics hilarious, as it implies that a lot of Marvel women go crazy for a hairy, short, drunk Canadian man who’s likely to stab you accidentally in the middle of the night.
Graphically the game is pretty impressive, as expected for Digital Eclipse. The models all look great, and animate beautifully. More importantly, the four X-Men have plenty of small touches that make them feel unique, and as we’ve discussed numerous times before it’s the small touches that make a difference. Just look at the walk animation for Rogue, my beloved who I will simp for until the heat death of the universe;
She’s the coolest energy and power vampire I’ve ever seen, man. Shame she’d kill me with but the faintest of touches, but it would be a worthwhile death.
Reign of Apocalypse doesn’t reinvent anything when it comes to the beat ‘em up controls and general gameplay save for one thing; there are in fact some juggle combos. You can fully smack enemies around when they’re in the air with really any attack and they will keep getting thrown back up. My record was 4 bounces using Rogue’s headbutt and dash punch, but I think I could have gotten another one in if I was a second faster. It’s nothing overly advanced, it’s not like you’re playing a handheld X-Men version of Tekken, but it’s something pretty neat.
Here we see evil Phoenix being juggled like the low tier X-Woman she is. Sorry, Jean Grey fans.
Overall, Reign of Apocalypse is a pretty solid beat ‘em up for the GBA. It doesn’t innovate much or push boundaries or anything like that, but it’s a competently made title with some soul in it. If kid Octopus ever had this, I know he would have been as down bad with it as I am now with Rogue’s walk animation.
Score
3 X-Genes out of 5.
Spider-Man
Developer: Digital EclipsePublisher: Activision
Year: 2001
Not to be confused with Vicarious Visions’ Spider-Man trilogy, one of the games we just played also on the GBA, or the SNES/Genesis’s Spider-Man, the other GBA Spider-Man is the movie-tie in for the first Sam Raimi movie which is of course a masterpiece. Fight me.
This Spider-Man is really just another repeat of Mysterio’s Menace; not bad, not really good, just fine.
The game loosely follows the story of the Raimi movie, with loosely being an important word there. It has the same general story beats but with way more classic villains; Tobey MacGuire never fought Kraven the Hunter or the Vulture in the movie (unfortunately).
Vulture? More like…Stupid Old Man-ture? Got ‘im.
You web and jump across levels, what else did you expect? This time around, there’s maybe slightly more going on control wise than in Mysterio’s Menace. You can hit the right shoulder button to shoot a web line that lets you zip yourself to whatever surface it hits. There’s also different web types you can use this time collected as power-ups; these include anything from webshields to grapple lines to…increasing your damage for a few seconds? Not sure how that’s a web related thing, but sure.
Following Digital Eclipse’s usual stylings, the game is pretty good graphically once again. The models are fine, but this time I think the animations aren’t up to their usual quality; climbing around on walls looked a little jittery. The game’s also a little rough performance wise, but this could be chalked up to emulation issues. There were frequent FPS drops and it got a little choppy, and the game even froze on me enough times that I just stopped playing.
There is a little bit of effort put into the game. Each level has photos you can take at certain spots by hitting select, there’s the bulky Raimi spider logos to collect in each level, and there’s plenty of secrets to find in them. It’s something, at least.
That’s really all I got, it’s just an okay enough movie tie-in game. Not much else to say about this one.
Score
2 ½ Thwips out of 5.
The Invincible Iron Man
Developer: Torus GamesPublisher: Activision
Year: 2001
This is the one game that I actually played as a kid, as Iron Man was (and still is, despite the MCU dominating any characterization of him since 2008) one of my favourite Marvel characters. The Invincible Iron Man is a decent enough game, though there’s not much going on in it.
Someone’s stolen one of Stark’s armours, which is something you really think he’d have better defences for; like a fingerprint scanner or something is all you need, dude. He takes off after the armour, and so the action-platforming begins.
The game plays a lot like a Mega Man in a rather fitting homage if you think about it. You have your chargeable Mega Buste- I mean, repulsors, and a dash you can do both on the ground and in the air. You have a flight assisted double jump, and if you find certain powerups in the levels you can unleash a screen clearing super move; if you do it with only one power orb, you shoot a unibeam forward and if you collect two power orbs, it clears the whole screen with some sort of weird lines or something, I don’t know.
Iron Man’s strongest weapon; the circle and the lines.
The biggest thing about the game is that I wish there was more to it. The controls are fine and the gameplay itself is actually pretty well done, there’s just not anything more than the basics in it. There’s no other weapons to play around with, there’s no fancy maneuvers to learn; you just run to the right (sometimes the left), and shoot the same enemies throughout the entirety of the game.
You run and gun through levels that bring you to some of the usual video game tropes; you start on the docks, go to a forest, then a lot of snow levels before the final evil industrial zone. The graphics are fine, nothing overly stands out but I can’t say they’re bad. The game sprites have a kinda cartoonish look almost going on with them, with Iron Man running like he’s Arthur from Ghosts ‘n Goblins for some reason. It carries that kind of cartoonish energy across the whole game; to finish a level, you touch the white flag at the end of it which then has Iron Man do a little dance and his face appears on the flag.
Oh that Tony Stark, such a goofy little guy.
Overall, it’s not a bad game but nothing special which is kind of disappointing as I think Iron Man particularly has the potential for a good video game. It had a lot of potential, and I think with a little more going on it could have been genuinely good. More weapons maybe that you can unlock over the course of the game, different enemies, you know, video game stuff.
Score
2 ½ Repulsors out of 5.
First four down, only twelve more to go. The first starting line up was a whole lot of mediocrity, given three of the games all had the same score of 2 ½ out of 5, aka 50%. At least we had Reign of Apocalypse, which is something I honestly may just play in my free time even; if only I knew of its existence as a kid.
And, I mean, that Rogue walk animation.
Until next time, when we’re up against a sample platter of Marvel superheroes. There’s some more Spider-Man as he will forever get games until the death of this reality, one of the few pre-6th gen Hulk games, and truly the most rare of them all; a Daredevil game. The only solo Daredevil game, and of all things it’s a tie-in to the legendary Ben Affleck movie. Remember that movie, and its complete and fundamental misunderstanding of the character and a whole lot of Evanescence and Godsmack? I do, I kinda wish I didn’t.
Until next time.
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