X-Men: Children of the Atom

"A bad port of a mediocre game. Approach only with a 100-foot sharpened stick and a haz-mat suit"

X-Men:COTA, back when it first came out, was revolutionary. With it's super-jumping combo madness, it was a very popular hit. It took Marvel Super Heroes for me to realize how... mediocre it was. Now, many, many moons later, and well after the MSH home release, X-Men finally creeps home. Needless to say, by now I was well ahead of this game, but tried it for a kick. That was probably the most painful purchase I ever made.

The game's graphics, while nice, are nowhere near the quality of Marvel Super Heroes, which came out on the PSX a year prior. Yet despite both the lower graphical quality AND the timespan, there is even MORE slowdown than in MSH. One Mega Optic Blast and the game comes to a screaching hault. God forbid how much slowdown Juggy creates by simply EXISTING, not to mention the Magnetic Tempest of Magneto's, makes ANYTHING in MSH look like child's play.

Control suffers because of the previously-mentiones slowdown, combined with the fact that the comboing system, especially air-combos, were very, very touchy, even in the arcade. Control this bad does NOT belong in a fighting game, where precision is KEY. It's saving grace is that special moves seem to be very easy to execute, despite slowdown's best attempts to foil those too. Sound is very, very weak. The music is sub-par, even for a fighting game, and the vocals, while very distinct, are often overidden by the music or sound effects.

What saves this game? Two things: The licence, and the very base of the engine. Capcom originally did wonders with the licence in the arcade, and that couldn't be screwed up by the port (Which was handled by Acclaim), and the engine itself isn't flawed, and occasionally allows a little fun. But the slowdown is a killer, and drags everything down with it. Avoid unless you're die-hard about the Marvel fighting games. If that, I pity you. I pity you if you actually enjoy thing game, yet wish for your ignorance, so I'd be able to enjoy it too...

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 07/16/01