"Hardest game ever, with one of the most INANE puzzle solutions ever made..."

Ah, the X-Men. You've read the comic, watched the Fox cartoon series, and of course seen the excellent movies. You know all about the main protagonists at this point as well. Wolverine, with his unbreakable adamantium skeleton, regenerative powers and fierce retractable claws. Cyclops, with his ability to fire blasts of energy from his eyes. Storm and her ability to control the weather, as well as Nightcrawler's strange appearance and knack for teleportation. Their fearless leader Professor Xavier, who has formidable psychic powers. You probably also know about the various villians as well; Magneto the master of metal, Sabretooth the half-beast, Juggernaut with his immense strength and unbreakable helm. Yes, it seems the world is infatuated with these wonderful freaks of nature. To reflect this, various games have been made over the years involving our mutant cast, some of them excellent (Konami's six-player arcade brawl and Capcom's SF2-esque slugfest) and others...well, not so excellent (the abysmal NES game by LJN). This game seems to fall somewhere in-between, with excellent 16-bit graphics, on-par Genesis sound/music and quite possible a difficulty level from the depths of Hades itself. Let's begin...

Story:

X-Men blah blah blah Professor Xavier senses trouble jabba jabba Magneto trying to take over the world etc...it's based mainly on a comic book that has been running strong for decades. Do yourself a favor, go read a few of the books, take a storyline from those and apply it here. You'll have one of the richest, most detailed plots in gaming history, not to mention a decent excuse to kick some evil supervillian rear end. Suffice it to say that the game developers had to work hard to come up with a plot line that hasn't been done to death in the million different universes of this franchise and they really didn't so it's up to you.

Graphics: 9/10

The Genesis really flexes its 16 bits on the visuals in this game. Characters are detailed, have fairly decent animation and are well-colored with a striking resemblence to their comic/cartoon counterparts. The X-Men which you can choose all have their special abilities and they look great, and the ones you can't choose provide aid as super-attacks which look even better. Backgrounds and evirons have plenty of touches that will make fanboys of the Marvel universe squealing with delight. You do battle in locations specific to the various plotlines of the comic as well as a few from the animated series, and they all look spectacular considering this old workhorse's limited color palette. Can't fault the game at all here.

Sound: 7/10

This category of course largely depends on how fond you are of the Genesis FM synthesis sound, so your mileage may vary. The music in this game is rather forgettable, which is a shame after hearing Yuzo Koshiro work that mutha in Streets Of Rage and Revenge Of Shinobi. Tunes are serviceable but not catchy at all. Same could be said of the sound effects, which include those rather weird FM synth sounds you hear in many Genesis games. The noises this game can make at times are rather shrill and loud, as if the programmers didn't know how to control the volume in their code. Tsk tsk, this lowers the score considerably. Actual PCM samples are sparse if not completely absent as well, which may or may not be a good thing considering how grainy the ol' Sega beast renders them.

Gameplay: 4/10

Ah crap, it was looking alright till we got here. Now it's time to start noticing a few important things about this game. First off, it's a beat-em-up/platformer hybrid, meaning you jump from ledge to ledge while putting the smackdown on enemies in a similar style to Sega's other game in this time period, Chakan The Forever Man. The gameplay's real twists come mainly in the form of mutant powers which each X-Man has, adherent to their character. However, you are severely limited (via a ''power bar'') to how much you can use them to the point where they become practically useless by the end of the game. Mutant bar refills are sporadic, so get good with your fists, and fast. The other catch, as mentioned earlier, is that you can call in non-playable X-Men for super-attacks that can kill all enemies on screen and severely damage bosses. Thing is, you will be using them almost exclusively for the latter aforementioned purpose so you're served best to save them until the big bad guys roll out on you.

So where does this game go south? Well, as you can probably surmise from above, this game is difficult to the point of being ludicrous. You will never play this game on Hard because there is simply no need to do so. Normal enemies are strategically placed to move so fast once they enter the screen that they will score that inevitable cheap hit and knock a point or two off your life meter. Platform jumps all too often require blind leaps of faith. Combined with the previous point, this make for a lot of thrown controllers when you finally make a difficult jump only to get knocked off by a two-bit thug. Bosses, well, see my point above about using backup X-Men super powers, because that's the ONLY way you're going to defeat a great majority of them. This game goes beyond the tough love of early NES games, which were difficult but beatable. No, this game is simply impossible to beat even on Normal without the use of a Game Genie. I've yet to find ANYONE in my 22 years of existence who has conquered this cartridge by skill alone, which should tell you something.

Furthermore, this game has one RIDICULOUS puzzle solution at the end of Mojo's World which warrants its own paragraph. Allow me to explain and you'll see why. Now, in this game every level you traverse is actually a recreation of the locale by the X-Men's training computer, the Danger Room. Thing is, the simulations are hacked by someone (hrrm, could it be...Magneto?) to make them deadly realistic. OK, so I lied, this game DOES have a plot, but that's not the point here. After you kick Mojo's wide butt into oblivion, you are told that the world you are in in collapsing and that you must ''reset the computer'' to escape. Back when this game as released, me and a friend spent a few hours trying to figure out where this ''computer'' was in the stage so we could ''reset'' it, right? So here we are, jumping around in the game like monkeys on meth, looking for any sort of computer-like device so we could beat the board and get to Magneto's evil lair. Unable to find it after a few hours, we gave in and called a Sega game counselor at the 900 number provided in the manual. So I ask him, ''How do you reset the computer in Mojo's World?''

Now brace yourself for the answer here. Ready yet? Good. The counselor replies to this query...

''You have to hit the Reset button on your Genesis console.''

I laughed quite loudly and asked him, ''Are you serious?!?'' He seemed certain, so I decided to try it at the risk of having to beat those 5 stages all over again should the Genesis actually RESET. Sure as pie, the game displayed a faux-error message as the ''system'' was resetting, and in a few seconds I was en-route to the evil Magneto's moon base.

Kudos to Sega for the craziest idea in the history of gaming, EVER. Breaking the third barrier, so to speak.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/16/04