"Just another victim of the garbage can toss..."

You've seen the comics, the cartoons, and even the little action figures. How could they possibly screw that up, you ask? Take five superheros and place them in a game with horrible sound, control and gameplay. To be completely honest, I’m really not sure just what story line is supposed to be taking place here, but whatever it is, I can’t make heads or tails of it. You can play as one of several different X-Men in an overhead view type of game in which your main mission is to defeat as many enemies that get in your way as possible without getting killed in the process. The real killer of the game is that the stages are so mismatched and the characters in the overhead view are so hard to control, that you have nothing but a large blurred mess to run through and hopefully defeat!

You run through the levels with a particular X-man, trying to make it from point A, to point B, but its all overhead. The enemies surround you, and before you know it, your dead, and it's game over! Come on, what is this garbage and what is it supposed to mean? In the very beginning of the game, you’ll find that you have selection over five different X-Men, all of which are supposed to have a particular power that you can use to make your way through the stages. What makes this difficult, is the insane difficulty level that you encounter when you first start playing the game and then the power ups that you have to find throughout the stages are hard to understand and use correctly! Different enemies come flying at you from every which way, and with the overhead view, it really is difficult to see just what is coming at you and from what direction. Add into this that you have a myriad of enemies that fire of projectiles in your direction, and you’ll find that making it through the first stage is not only tough, but damn near impossible!

The control is just another factor that you’ll have to contend with when you decide that you’re going to play through. With the overhead view that you’re stuck with, the response from the Nintendo controller really isn’t much in terms of helping you through the various stages. With only two buttons to work with, and both of those being an attack button, you’ll have to have precision timing to really hit whatever it is that you’re going after in each of the stages! Probably one of the most sorely missed features here is a real to comic super hero move that could be used, but to be honest, I can’t find one thing with the NES control that could handle the inputs needed to do something like that. Compile it with the stiff control and lack of moves, and honestly, you have nothing to look forward to but thumb busting and rather boring thumb busting at that!

Its all overhead. The only thing that can make you tell who is who, is the type of flash it makes when you attack, and the crumpling body on the ground when you die. The enemies look much the same and the levels don't seem to change in anyway except the coloring of the ground you trod over. With that sort of visual inaccuracy, it really is hard to truly enjoy whatever the game has to offer in terms of effects and even detailing for each of the stages! You can pretty much picture what the game looks like onscreen when you take a white sheet of paper, some water-color paints and then throw it altogether without much of a pattern to go by, and that is what you have. To top all of this off, you can immediately tell that this is a first generation Nintendo game by the sheer amount of image break up and in some cases, completely missing screens of action when it gets way too intense!

A couple of the sound effects are indeed pretty good, considering that this is an 8-bit system, the predecessor for everything that we play today. The rest of the sound on the other hand is a muddled together set of high and low crashes with some sort of MIDI music to accompany it with! There is no voice over sound effects that you can hear and with most points in the game, even the ‘music’ is muted and static to the point of creating a heavy headache. Considering that this is an original Nintendo, I do have to give it some credit when it comes to actually programming the game and how much they had intended to accomplish in doing so. However, when you put it altogether, you really don’t have anything that will impress you in the musical department and only a couple of the sound effects will really leave a lasting impression on your mind!

You won't replay this, it will sit on your shelf and collect dust, and you can't sell it for more than 50 cents at any resell shop. Trade it to anyone else for a different NES game, very few people still have an NES in their home, let alone any thing that is as bad as this particular game. When you boil down the sheer amount of crap that you have to wade through in order to get to the end and see the Nintendo version of an ending, you’ll find that all the hours that you played through and all of the time you wasted are for naught! Even though it is an ancient game, I rented this once years ago to play. When I received this copy from a friend who was trashing all of his stuff, I popped it into the deck (Yes, I've still got an old school Nintendo) and turned it on, to remember why I didn't like it the first time. Disgusting graphics (even back then) disappointing sound, and even worse gameplay, made this game something I had wished I didn't pay 5 dollars (That's what it was back then to rent) to play!

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 01/31/00, Updated 11/23/01