Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge

"Controller-grindingly hard and overall frustrating"

I got this game for my 7th birthday and it took me until last year to finally beat the damn thing. This was partially due to the staggering difficulty of the game and partially due to the fact that I could not bring myself to sit through the multiple hours of poor quality gaming to see the ending. The premise of the game is that you start as Spiderman in a weird, cross-over universe that has Spiderman and the X-men both in the same city. The X-men have been disappearing one by one and Spiderman is out to save them. You soon find out that the psychotic evil villain Arcade is behind the kidnappings and you must play through his demented “fun-house” with each of the super heroes to free them from Arcade's deadly trap.

The game has 12 levels total; an intro level, two levels for each of the game's five characters (Spiderman, Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops and Gambit for those interested...) and a final, ending level. As I already mentioned, the difficulty for this game is staggering. I've played through other “difficult” SNES titles, such as the notorious Super Ghouls and Ghosts and the acclaimed UN Squadron and they still do not compare to the difficulty found in Spiderman and the X-men. Keep this in mind if you do decide to pick this one up.

It helps to read the instruction manual before picking up this game, as it tells you a bit more about the characters, their controls and their stages (I'll be going over the same things and I'm not going to spoil anything that isn't in the instruction manual).

Graphics: 6/10

This game was released fairly early in the 16 bit genre and it definitely shows. The game looks only marginally better than an 8-bit game. Some of the character sprites are so poorly done that they are nearly unrecognizable. Half the fun of the game comes from looking at each of the game's bosses and trying to figure out which character they represent. The movement and animations of each character looks quite awkward, pretty much without exception. I am still haunted by how bad Cyclops's kick looks...

The game gets an extra point or two from me because the backgrounds are very stylistically put-together and, crappy character sprites aside, the whole game looks remarkably like the comic books the title characters were taken from. If only they'd spent more time on the characters, this game might actually be a graphically impressive title.

Sound: 6/10

There are precisely six songs you hear over the course of the game, not counting various menu tunes which bump the total up to 10; One for each of the characters and one for the final stage. The songs perform reasonably well. Most are not particularly catchy and some are downright annoying, but they are overall passable.

As for the rest of the sound, it is equally unimpressive. Each of the heroes, aside from Storm, shares a series of grunts and yells that they shout out when they are hit. These grunts are even shared by some of the villains. This really makes all the characters just seem like the same person in a different costume and detracts from the overall gameplay. The remainder of the sounds are passable, despite the fact that they are largely of sub-par quality.

Gameplay: 5/10
Controls: 4/10

I'm going over these two aspects together, as it's simply easier to do it that way. This game is sadistically difficult in so many ways, it's not even funny. Your characters are each granted a health bar (Storm is, once again, the exception and is granted an air meter that doubles as a health bar). However, this is almost a superfluous gesture given the obscene proliferation of instant-death traps ranging from bottomless pits to quicksand-filled playpens. You are only given three lives total (shared amongst the heroes), barring any 1-ups you gain in the stages, which are extremely rare. There is no password or save-game system for you to use, so you have to beat the whole game in a single sitting. The controls are overall unresponsive and more than a little bit awkward, as a whole. It's easier to talk about the remainder of the gameplay by character, so I'll break down each character one at a time.

Spiderman

Spiderman is probably the most polished and refined of all the characters and his levels are by far the most entertaining to play. He can climb most (but not all) walls, shoot bits of webbing as a projectile attack and use his webs to swing from the ceiling. In addition to being the character you control in the intro level, he has two additional levels of his own. His levels take place in New York, one in a construction zone and one on the rooftops.

Regrettably, the webslinger is plagued by a host of problems (then again, what isn't in this game?), the primary one being his web-swinging. To control spiderman while he's on a line of webbing, you either hold up to pull him closer to the ceiling or down to drop him away from the ceiling. Unfortunately, you only get one shot at some of your swings (Spidey only swings forwards; he can't hold onto the web and swing back) and the very touchy controls mean that it's very easy to over or undershoot your destination and instead land yourself in the middle of a bottomless pit. Furthermore, since this ability can be used to traverse great distances, you sometimes can't see what's ahead of you and where you're supposed to land, leading to some guesstimation that more often than not ends in death.

Wolverine

Probably the most juxtaposed character/stage pairing in the game belongs to Wolverine. The surly brawler is placed in a carnival-like environment filled with psychotic clowns and oversized death-toys. Wolverine is the game's only pure-melee character, and has the misfortune of being placed in an environment filled with enemies that all have ranged weaponry, leaving you with the feeling that you brought a knife to a gunfight. Wolverine's controls are some of the sloppiest in the game, and it can, at times, be quite difficult to kill a clown that's right in front of you. He is, at times, called to make some jumps that I'm tempted to call impossible. Wolverine also has arguably the hardest bosses in the game, since he has to fight them while standing only a few pixels away from them and trying not to get hit.

Wolverine's second level is a big complaint of mine, because you spend the entire level being chased by Juggernaut, who will instantly kill you if he touches you. Juggernaut has an obscene amount of health... so much, in fact, that uninformed players will be left wondering if they're doing any damage to him at all and if they shouldn't be trying a different method to kill him. This actually isn't the case and you basically have to spend the whole level clawing away at the guy and dropping weights on his head and even then, you'll probably get to the end of the level without having killed him (the end of the level is an endless death pit, meaning you die if you haven't killed Juggernaut yet). The whole experience is frustrating in the extreme.

Storm

The odd-duck of the game and the only playable character without a Y chromosome, Storm plays totally differently than any other character in the game. I know what you're thinking, “She can fly and control weather, right? That means she should be awesome, right?” Well, apparently the game designers were thinking the same thing you were because, in order to prevent that very thing from happening, they stuck her in a water level. She is forced to swim her way through two maze-like levels and find the exits to each one. Easier said than done, as she has limited air and can only stay under-water for so long before she drowns. This means that, unless you've already played through the level, you may accidentally raise the water level to get to a new area and wind up trapping yourself in a dead end without enough time to get out.

Storm's levels are not so much annoying as they are boring. They contain few enemies or surprises and are more an exercise in memorization than they are of gameplay skill. They are probably the closest thing to “easy” this game has, but are also the least fun to play.

Cyclops

Cyclops has easily the crappiest controls and worst designed levels in the game. Both his courses take place in an underground mine filled with soldiers that shoot guns and grenades (that do craploads of damage) at you, as well as strange, zombie-like creatures that have the ability to block your laser attack, forcing you to tangle with them up close and personal.

The thing that makes Cyclops's levels so frustrating is the whole things are set over electric rail tracks that are, you guessed it, instant death traps. In order to traverse the maze-like levels that seem to go in circles, you must ride mine carts. The problem here is twofold: First, there are mines (the explodey kind) on the track that can blow up your cart if you don't shoot them first. These can come up very quickly, and if you're not right on top of things (or if you happen to miss them with your laser blasts), then you get killed in one shot. Secondly, the mine carts themselves are extremely finickity. If you don't land precisely where the game expects you to, it will not “catch” you with the cart, and you will instead jump right onto the tracks, ending your life.

Gambit

There is little doubt in my mind that Gambit was cursed with the hardest stages in the game. One has you chased across the screen by a giant, spiked ball (more instant death fun) and the other has you on a rising platform trying not to get crushed in your ascent. The thing that makes Gambit's levels so hard is the fact that he uses cards as an attack (throwing them a short distance in front of him) and apparently our crafty Cajun friend forgot to bring more than one deck with him. Yes, you have ammo. And after it's expended, Gambit cannot attack. Period. Which is REALLY frustrating if it happens when you're facing down a boss. Gambit can refill his ammo only by killing enemies and picking up cards they drop. Of course, if you can't attack you're not going to be killing any enemies any time soon, so the big message here is “Don't let that card deck run out.”

Overall: 5/10

The whole game is one big frustration from start to finish. I'm a fan of difficult games, but I prefer the games to be fair. Super Ghouls and Ghosts is a good example; the game is tough as nails, but it's never “cheap.” All the controls are spot on and enemies are reasonably placed. Jumps may be difficult, but not due to a flawed physics engine.

Spiderman and the X-men is everything a difficult game should not be. It features bad controls, poor level design and overall unenjoyable gameplay. Only pick this game up if you're feeling particularly masochistic.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/29/07

Game Release: Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge (US, November 1992)