X-Men
Reviewed 10/12/00

It's a bit of a challenge for me to review a really bad game. When reviewing, I'm used to pointing out all of the good points, and rambling on about them, which is why you don't see many games score below a 70. Primarily, there's 3 reasons for this lack of crappy game reviews: first, I am pretty careful with my money and want to buy the best games, so my collection doesn't have too many bombs. Second, I think the overall good to bad game ratio for the NES is something like 10 to 1. Lastly, if a game is bad, I'm naturally not going to want to play enough to give a review. That's why it's such a daunting, draining task; with a game such as X-Men, I have to push myself to get the scoop on the game and, at the same time, ward off the tendencies of wanting to slam a screw-driver into my head repeatedly. You better appreciate it punks!

But enough ranting, we are here to discuss LJN's fine masterpiece, The Uncanny X-Men. They try to fool you to start with, with a some-what decent title screen showing off all of the heroes heads. All aspirations of having a fun time should be dropped off here, when you get into the game you know you are in for a truly bad experience. Maybe this sounds cliche', but it really is hard to figure out what to harp on first. B is jump and A is attack, that's never good. You can tell that the coding bad right away, it's very glitchy. The graphics are below crap, they try to bungle too much stuff on the screen at once, and overcomplicate the backdrops. Not good when you have an obvious lack of talent in the graphics department. The character movements are so gall-faced pitiful it is beyond description.

As sad as this all sounds, you can tell LJN at least tried with this one. The idea is good, it sounds cool in theory: an overhead beatemup, 8 playable characters with thier own strengths and weaknesses, and an X Men license. The problem is, they fumbled pathetically with the execution of everything when developing this game. Enemy's attacks are too sporadic, jumping is useless, the mazes are ridiculously open-ended, etc., etc., etc. The fact that there are unpredictable laser barriers in every level that kill you instantly, and it's really a matter of chance whether you pass through them or not, puts the final nail in the coffin of this dispicable plague on society, and marks it as "unplayable".

Graphics 1
inexcusably bad, enemies are choppy and even blinking and backgrounds are jumbled together
The title and the character profiles are decent, I guess :/
Sound 3
Not the worst thing about this game
But still a million miles from good, I just played and can't remember a single tune
Innovation 4
As I said, it sounds good in premise, not many overhead beatemups
But what good is originality when the game is a festering dung heap?
Gameplay 1
Headache-inducing bad
Completely unplayable for more than a few minutes
Replay Value 0
Simply non-existant

11%
Overall Score

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