What’s your favorite X-Men game?
Welcome To The Multiverse
This week, we took a bit of a nod from TV’s hottest new show, Legion, and turned eye our toward the history of X-Men video games. Anthony John Agnello endeavored to scour the mutants’ gameography and pull out three titles—the best, the worst, and the weirdest—that tell us a little something about what it takes to make this series work in video game form. Naturally, the comments were full of other suggestions for those three distinctions, namely which X-Men game is the best ever. X-Men Legends, the action RPG from Raven Software, was a popular choice. (By the way, here’s Anthony talking about why he went in a different direction.) Evan Waters summed up its merits:
I find X-Men Legends was the best for a couple of reasons. One, it really lets you wander around in the fan-friendly minutiae of the franchise—the “hub” between missions is Xavier’s mansion, and you can spend a while just going and meeting the various characters, finding collectibles, running Danger Room simulations, etc. The plot involves the Sentinels, Magneto, the Morlocks, Muir Island, and a battle in Professor X’s subconscious. It really only leaves out the space-opera stuff.
And it does a really good job at the truly chaotic feel the X-Men comics always had when they were in the heat of action. You’ve got four heroes unleashing major powers all the time, wrecking everything in the environment, including the goddamn walls, and surprise “combos” keep popping up and showing you how to use their powers together. There’s something truly satisfying about just blasting your way through an enemy compound.
Heart Like A Fridge went for something even more chaotic:
I definitely echo the love for Legends and the glorious, quarter-sucking side-scrolling of the six-player arcade game, but for me the idea of an X-Men video game is best captured in Capcom’s work from Children Of The Atom, X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, and the Marvel Vs. Capcom Series.
Obviously, story is secondary (Hello, Onslaught and Abyss!) and that is a demerit when talking about the X-Men and their history, but those fighting games were the living embodiment of childhood arguments about who would win in a fight between Storm and Iceman or Cyclops and Wolverine and then blew up into the craziness of the Vs. series (and the glorious cheapness of Cable’s specials). But that series was the most fun I had with the X-Men.
LJN’s Uncanny X-Men for the NES was a near-unanimous pick for worst game. The Greetest For No Raisin recalled a particularly tragic encounter with this turd: