X-Men: Children of the Atom

"A sluggish arcade port that should have never been attempted"

Before you had Marvel vs Capcom or Marvel Super Heroes, you had X-Men: Children of the Atom, which was the originator of all those Marvel fighters. The original arcade version was a good fighting game that manage to lay the basic blueprint for all future Marvel fighters to be built around. However, the fighter was released around 95 (I could be wrong) and it took a while before a home version was finally released. The thing was Acclaim, not Capcom, was responsible for the port... how does it fare?

STORY: Magneto is up to no good and it's up to the X-Men to stop him and his cronies. That's the general idea, anyway; other than that, this is nothing more than a fighting game in which a bunch of guys go on to beat the crap out of each other. There's no reasoning why the X-Men fight each other, but not everyone plays fighters for the story... 5/10

GRAPHICS: In retrospect, the graphics are fine. It's your typical Capcom graphics. They seem clean enough, but the fighters tend to get a little choppy due to the slowdown which plagues the game. Besides that, they all seem to be well adapted from the arcade. 7/10

SOUND: The sounds and voices are nice and crisp, and seemed to be good enough to get reused for a couple of later games. Music is nothing to brag about - it's your typical Capcom soundtrack. It's all a matter of taste. 8/10

GAMEPLAY: While control in this game is adequate (albeit a big sluggish for my tastes) and the special moves are somewhat easy to pull off (as easy as Street Fighter-style moves usually are), the constant slowdown is where X-Men takes a fatal blow and destroys the game completely. The game plays slower than it did in the arcade game and is worse when you have two huge characters fighting against each other. It seemed pretty obvious that the original Playstation system wasn't (and still isn't) capable of running this type of game without some sort of sacrifice. If it wasn't worth porting it, it shouldn't have been done at all. Your modes of play are Arcade and Versus. Sure, this is an old game, but I expected more. 4/10

CHALLENGE: The computer AI is quite challenging and will give you a good fight, but you also have to fight the game's slowdown. The bosses will give you a rough time either way and limited continues do not make things any better. 5/10

REPLAY VALUE: It's a fighting game, so if you can sucker a buddy into playing a few rounds with you, chances are you'll have a fun time playing Street Fighter II. As for this game, chances are you'll play through it once before giving up on it. 3/10

OVERALL: X-Men is a game that could have been a good port in the hands of those who knew what they were doing (for example, Capcom) rather than those who didn't have a clue (for example, Acclaim and Probe). It's a bit fun to try it out at first for the novelty of it, but once the novelty washes off, you're left with a game that not only is too limited to be enjoyed for any long term period of time, but is too slow and sluggish that a port should have never even been attempted. It's a damned shame because I really wanted to like this game despite its shortcomings. Alas, it was not to be. If you can find it cheap, go ahead and pick it up. Otherwise, find something else. 4/10

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/01/04