The Uncanny X-Men

"X-crement."

One day, back in my early childhood, I was playing in one of my friend’s house when suddenly I saw the X-Men cartridge in the floor, I’ve never been an American comic fan (I’m into manga), but I used to enjoy the X-Men animated TV series a lot, so I asked my friend if he could lend me the game for a while. Well, not only he lend me the game, he even said I could keep it forever, I was surprised, at the age of ten children NEVER give their toys and even less their video games that easily, but when I arrived home and started playing I immediately understood the reason…

This game is based in the comics more than the TV series because the characters have the old comic look (which I found horrible by the way). Anyway that’s just to say something because in the game they don’t have a look, they are just a horrible bunch of pixels, sometimes it’s really hard to see which character you have selected because they all have the same shape and the only things different are the colours, and depending on the scenario sometimes I even had trouble trying to figure out if that “thing” over there was my character or just a boulder or something on the screen. Amazing!, and I don’t even want to talk about the music because I don’t want to get banned, GameFaqs would never post my review if I decide to talk about it.

Our mutants can be divided in two groups those who can shoot and those who can’t, aside from that there is no difference between them, all of them punch and shoot in the same way. I’ve noticed that Nightcrawler for example is faster than the others, but with so many enemies on the screen the game is as slow as a snail with arthritis because the Nes can’t take so many images on the screen at the same time, so it is the same, what I mean is that some of them have that kind of special powers, but you are not going to be playing for such a long time to see what they have to offer, believe me. We always have to play with a friend, if we don’t have another human being to play with then the cpu will take of care of the other one, and I have to say that I have never EVER seen such a bad AI, never, ok maybe it is unfair to say such a thing, because X-Men does not have an AI at all. It is very funny, once you start playing, the characters controlled by the cpu will start to act like if it had ants into the pants just to get stuck with something on the screen in the next ten seconds, and that is, sooner or later the enemies are going to kill her, and you will be able to keep “playing” (as the two characters have to advance together it is impossible to continue until the cpu dies, so you will have to wait), and that way you will be free to experience the pain alone.

So, this game plays more or less like a shooter, you have to move forwards killing uncountable hordes of pixels that are supposed to enemies and that never cease to appear. Up to this point maybe you are wondering about what kind of plot or whatsoever does this disgrace has, but the truth is that you won’t find any single trace of it, and this is mainly because there isn’t any plot AT ALL. You are probably thinking that there should be at least a little text explaining that Magneto wants to conquer the world or some crap like that but you don’t know how wrong you are, I just can imagine that Magneto was the last boss because I owned the game and he was at the cartridge label, but I don’t really know, and what is more I don’t want to know.

At the beginning you can choose between five or six “missions” (I can’t remember the exact number) and you will be immediately sent there without being given any detail about what the hell you have to do. Needless to say that I haven’t beaten the game, I haven’t even cleared a single mission, (I am not a masochist you know?), but believe me, it is not necessary to see that this game is much more than garbage.

The two player option can be fun for about thirty minutes, or what’s the same, after you and your friends stop laughing because of the unbelievably crappy look of the game.

Perpetrated by that infamous (and fortunately dead a lot of years ago) company called LJN, this X-Men is one of the worst games I’ve played in my whole life. I use to enjoy almost every game I try, more or less, but this is CRAP with capital letters, it is impossible to say anything good about it.

”My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry about that.”

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 11/22/03, Updated 02/22/04