Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 438: X-Men Games

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Despite existing for nearly 30 years beforehand, it took until nearly the '90s for the X-Men to find their way into video games. And it should come as no surprise that the IP's Renaissance during that decade coincided with some of the most notable games to ever feature Professor X's collection of special youngsters. (Though the aughts blessed us with a few worth talking about as well.) On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and Gary Butterfield as the crew examines the most entertaining adaptations of this group of super-powered freaks who just might be an allegory for something. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 100+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

Retronauts is part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us in more great shows at podcast.hyperx.com. This week on Retronauts, we redefine the word bampth. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Macky. And today's topic is X-Men Games, the most notable X-Men games throughout history. And this is actually a sequel to a series we did in the past. So in the past, Henry Gilbert helped spearhead a Spider-Man game series. There were two podcasts about that. Those are Retronauts 135 and 204. So this episode is actually pitched to us by one of our, let's say, podcast. We're podcasting friends in the extended. We're part of each other's extended universes, I believe. We'll get to that in a second. But before I continue, who is here with us today in the same room?

It's Henry Gilbert. Snickdy, sneakdy, schnois. Henry, you do that again, you have to leave. I'm sorry. And who do we have on the line? This is the person who actually pitched this episode, and I was happy to oblige. This is Gary Butterfield.

I'm the best there is at what I do. And what I do is pretty nice, actually. And I have to assume that is an X-Men quotes. Yeah. Some X-Man said that. I am the odd man out. here so gary and henry are our x-men uh stewards and uh masters and i am just a patrick stewards exactly he figures into this in some way and uh yeah i i am kind of like

on the on the fringes of x-men culture i know a bit about them just from being a little boy in the 90s but really it's henry and gary who are bringing all the knowledge to this topic and i just looked at a bunch of old games and their footage but before we continue uh gary what's your relationship with the x-men i know you have an x-men podcast as well Well, please talk about that and where the X-Men found you in your life. Yeah, this is my serious comic book love, my favorite. It wasn't my first comic book, which was Firestorm, the nuclear man. But the X-Men was the thing I went deep on, the first comic book that I got in on the ground floor, you know, influenced by the cartoon being a kid in the 90s.

The, you know, worse than Batman, but I was a kid kind of cartoon that came out in the 90s. and you know how things imprint on you when you're a teen. So for me, it was just X-Men all the way. And that has had a lot of inertia for me. I'm a general comics guy, but X-Men are always going to be my first love. And I think that, similar to Spider-Man, I think they've had a pretty good batting average with video games. Like, there's a good amount of crap.

But for licensed games, like, there are a lot of good X-Men games, the same way there are a lot of good Spider-Man games. Yeah, they had a pretty good... Generally keep an eye on them. They had a pretty good 10-year run, I think, and we're going to talk about that, the kind of 90s, early odds renaissance for this IP in gaming. But, Henry, what is your comic book origin story, X-Men specifically? Yes. Well, as you noted, I am more of a Spider-Man guy that was, I stewarded those two episodes because I truly love Spider-Ban the most of all.

But the X-Men I definitely enjoy quite a lot as well. I, uh, they were, they were the cool guys. Spider-Man was less cool than the X-Men, though, I mean, the Todd McFarlane run was pretty good, but the X-Men were so big in the 90s. Uh, my brother and I had almost all of the X-Men toys in the first like several runs of the toy biz run. And it was appointment viewing to see the X-Men animated series that debuted in 1992. And of course, like all of the, uh, not to spoil, but all the games we talk about here. I was pretty much there day one for them because it was like yeah the X-Men because you always as Spider-Man game you're going to play a Spider-Man but in X-Men game it's about like okay who gets Wolverine

who gets Colossus who gets whoever and so the choice was the fun thing and and also you know I was attracted to how the X-Men are a collection of weirdos and that it can be an allegory for you know being different either you know it works as a queer allegory

as a ethnicity allegory, minority allegory of any kind. It's very flexible. Yeah, yeah. It's great like that. It's a Rorschach test for any outsider. Yes, yeah. And so, yes, I, of course, have so much affinity for the X-Men. As we talked about on two different, what a cartoon podcast as well,

that the animated series and evolution. As for me, I'm not trying to be contrarian. I consider this a failure by both Star Wars and Marvel to not put. prey on me as a young child because for whatever reason I bought some of these cards for the X-Men of course I watched the cartoon in 1992 and beyond because I was like oh cool

a new cartoon and these characters are fun it's not as cool as Batman but I still enjoy watching it for some reason I never thought I should buy comic books because this is weird nobody growing up in my classrooms in school were comic book readers there were never any comic book readers and I would see them at the store but it was

an issue of economy for me thinking if I buy a mad magazine I can get like eight or ten stories instead of just one comic story and I didn't have a lot of money so I was more of a magazine head and that's why I really avoided comics and yeah I always thought they were cool but

I never really got into the actual stories even though for some reason I was also a wizard reader because again magazine head and for some reason I thought well it's important that I know this but I can't just buy a lot of these like single issue comics that's a lot of money but yeah so I'm just kind of on

the outside but I do appreciate the X-Men as like an idea and I like the costumes and I have some nostalgia for you know the 90s period of X-Men of course you went to a specific place for comics like it felt it was a little bit intimidating like you get a magazine at the store you go with your parents or whatever comics you have to go to a comic store and when I went I grew up in a college town and there were a bunch of like guys in their early 20s talking about preacher and bone and I was just you know scared of all that stuff as a teen like I didn't I didn't know what to do about that so there was there was was a hump to get into it just because it was a bespoke place full of cool older kids

which had an appeal but also it was scary i i was very lucky that i had like uh in when i was 10 a couple 12 year olds were like hey spider man and x men are the coolest read read my comics and then that got me on board and on top of that i was very lucky to live in marietta georgia when i got in the comics and my local comic shop was Dr. Knows comics K-N-O-W-S which was run by the guys who did Comic Shop News so they were

like very, oh wow. They knew lots of stuff and could actually like explain shit to me and I learned a lot from that so that I had a good indoctrination process to become a lifelong comic book Dorko. I think I mentioned this before on another podcast but here I am

saying it again where I think the history of these characters I found somewhat alienating where actually I got into comic books briefly when I was like 13 because the Max adaptation was airing on MTV and I was like oh this is such a cool story I want to read the comics now going to the comic book store and all of the Marvel and DC comics were like in the 200s or 300s the image comics were like around 15 or 17 or 23 so it was so easy to just buy the entire story that existed so far but encountering like you know Spider-Man 308 I know that's way wrong Henry

No no actually Oh really Close in the timeline there But yeah Encountering that I'm like I don't know What part of the storyline this is I don't know how much I need to know

About the character The internet was not around For me at least at that point So yeah it was the history Of these characters That really alienated me And perhaps if I had the internet And if wikis were around

It'd be much easier to get like A refresher or a primer or whatever But it was really like I don't even know where to start And maybe that was part of the gatekeepingness of comics at the time like yeah you ask the comic book guy your store where do you start he makes fun of you for not knowing anything you must be tortured first it's part of the the process yes

or you know at the time the one of the reasons i think i latched on to x-men which feels kind arbitrary was because they had gone through this huge renaissance in the 90s they were launching in a bunch of new number ones and uh some of these were you know quite good like this is where the adjective list just x-men came out that's a pretty good comic but it also is the reason why i'm kind of ride or die for like generation X and X men 2099 and stuff because I was hard up for number ones like I wanted to get in on the ground

floor so these were characters that seemed cool and there were number ones coming out around the same time so I felt like I can get the complete story even if those number ones were kind of false like you know adjective list X-Men is just continuing the story it's just a number one for marketing purposes

a comics classic that I was robed by as a kid and now I am that X-Men number one I remember reading it, my mom reading it to my brother and me in like a, in a tent on a camping trip we did once, like, because it was so hot and new. But yeah, it's, we were, we were fans of X-Men at the time. X-Men were at their peak. In the last 20 years of X-Men have actually been like slowly making them less relevant over time, which is very strange. Yeah, American comics are in a really weird place.

And I wonder if kids today had the same problem I did 25 years ago, the alienation, the not knowing where to jump in. Because if you look at modern sales figures, manga is eclipsing American comic sales by a huge percent. It's like pretty amazing. I don't even think about it. But yeah, with a manga series, it's like, okay, I'll start at book one. And then I'll read it until I'm out of numbers. But with comics, I know DC, I'm very ignorant on this topic, by the way. But I know DC, occasionally they'll be like, well, now this is number one.

We're starting over. This is number one. And they kept doing that for a while, as far as I know. I know it's not Marvel, of course. No, Marvel does the same thing. Marvel does it too. Yeah, they all,

DC does more of like a clean sweep of telling everybody. And this is the new universe and we're starting over from one and all that. They do that every like five to ten years. But Marvel more just goes like, look, we're not rebooting the entire universe, but it's one again. And it's a new starting point. It's friendly to readers. But yeah, they don't.

They, I think they spent 20 plus years scoffing at, All the new readers brought in by Japanese comic books, and they're just like, well, that's not comic. And so they didn't know how to talk to those kids. And now, on top of that, like, I've seen this pointed out by the awesome Twitter user slash comic creator, Iron Spike, on Twitter. Just like that these giant, these Kickstarter projects for web comics that certainly the publishers of X-Men think of like, they're not the X-Men. They make more money on selling their thing on Kickstarter than a single issue of X-Men does. Like, they are their competition. And our comic store recently closed.

I mean, it was definitely pandemic-related, but it was going to be on the way out. That space was huge. It was frankly too nice for a store I never saw a lot of customers in. It was the greatest comic shop. The comic relief was why I moved to this town. Now you're just making sense. I'm sorry. I'm not allowed to talk about anything Japanese except for the video games on this podcast.

I do you want to talk about the history. want Henry and Gary to talk about the history while I go, uh-huh, interesting, because I know you both know a lot about it. And I do by just osmosis because I was on two X-Men animated series podcast with Henry who produced those and put together history of the property. But just within the next 15, 20 minutes, let's just go over the brief overview, like where they came from, the 90s Renaissance we lived through, and other things like that. Oh, sure. So starting September 1963 this is at the height of silver age marvel like they are everything's starting to pick up they had fantastic four they had the hulk they got thor they got the avengers they got spider-man so they're like well we need a new idea all the time like what's the next big team that we've got and so september 1963 jack kirby and stanley get together to create a new group of weird superheroes uh but these guys hide their superhuman abilities from the world uh it was definitely part of inspired by DC books like Doom Patrol and Challenges of the Unknown. Yeah. Doom Patrol isn't

even weirder set of weirdos. Like they're the weirdest weirdos ever. But, but yeah, so they're like, well, let's get a weird team who also their thing is that they're born with the power, but they keep it a secret. And I do think it is somewhat informed by Stan and Jack's experiences as Jewish men who, you know, have to exist in the racist old days of America. Like they were both Stan Lee is Stanley Lieber. Jack Kirby is Jacob Kurtzberg. And not that they like, you know, heed their background or ethnicity. But, you know, they've like they were adult men in the Nazi American Nazi party days. You know, like they. So I think even from the beginning, I think Stan Lee kind of if you ask him later, he's like, oh yeah, we were thinking of like Magneto's Malcolm X and Professor X is Martin Luther King. And it's like, I get, I'm sure that was there a little bit. But I think. from the beginning, at the very least, their experience as Jewish men existing in Gentile society, I do think somewhat informed the metaphor at the heart of the X-Men. And this is 63 they're created, right? Yes. And is the 70s when Marvel starts to dominate or is the

60s? So 60s, they were big. So it was, Marvel was kind of nothing in the 40s and 50s. It was DC's game. 60s start. DC is the old, is pretty much is the only successful superhero company. And then Marvel creates this new like pop wave, like just as like, you know, Beatles is happening, all this stuff for teenagers. Marvel specifically with Stanley as the editor-in-chief was writing much more for teenagers instead of children. Like he was the Sega to Nintendo of the 90s.

And it helped that he had Jack Kirby, the probably greatest comic book artist in American history at the very least. like helping him with creating all these characters everybody loves, as well as Steve Ditko, co-creating Spider-Man for him. So that really helped. But an important thing to know with X-Men's history, too, is that they were not a hit in the 60s. Like, they were never that big.

They never knew what they wanted to do with them. Kirby didn't draw on the X-Men for that long, which shows that, like, Stanley felt you're better off elsewhere, Jack. Like, let's have you working more on an Avengers book or The Silver Surfer books. uh yeah through the 60s it was not that big a hit and it even went like kind of out of print for a time it was just they wouldn't they wouldn't stop public reprints right because if they didn't do reprints they'd lose the like copyright it was kind of a copyright thing so so it was just a reprint book but then may 1975 uh the late land wine and artist dave cockram they come up with an idea to relaunch the x-men with a with a brand new team It is giant-sized X-Men number one. It is known as this major event, and it completely changes the X-Men team. The old X-Men team, just a bunch of white guys and one girl, and they got superpowers.

But Len Wein really wanted to see it as an international thing and bring the metaphor of diversity even more to the front. So there's a Russian, there's an African, there was a German, a Japanese, Scottish, indigenous people of America, and even a tiny little Canadian that would surely never be popular. Yeah, he's a constant. Even though weirdly second appearance of that guy, the first appearance is extremely weird where he fights the Hulk

and he was meant to be a wolverine who's like an actual animal Wolverine whose power was they turned into a human. Yep, yeah. Which is incredible. But they gave up on that. Those early, the 60s comics and stuff, it makes sense.

I was very surprised when I first learned that those have gone into obscurity and everything and then I went back and read them and they're pretty rough. Yeah. Even on the scale of 60s Marvel. Like if you read an old Fantastic Four comic, you can kind of see why it's charming. The old X-Men comics

are really bizarre. There's all kinds of stuff about like Professor X lusting over Gene Gray. 16 years old at the time. Yeah, he's like super old. And there's a line where he's like, she'll never love me as long as I'm so old and I'm in this wheelchair.

And it's really bizarre, like they're weird comics. So it was kind of like a stunt when they, it felt like a little bit when they brought them back. You know, the new X-Men didn't have that much to do with the old X-Men other than the basic concept. Like it had been lying fallow. And it was such lightning in a bottle when they brought it back

because those characters, you know, more people know about Wolverine than any of the other X-Men, more people probably, you know, recognize Colossus before they recognize Angel. Yeah, I think so. Storm is huge, you know, way bigger than Ice Man, like way bigger than those original characters. And by 75, like Beast even got transformed to not even look like the Jack Kirby design of Beast either. Like he was the big, beautiful bouncing blue boy that he's one, he's, uh, maybe it's because his name is Henry or Hank McCoy, but he's right there on your wall.

Yes. No, Beast is a favorite of mine. And it's wearing his finest. Yeah. But, uh, and yeah, I mean, yes, this, that giant size, not that people don't love Cyclops Gene Gray. Angel, Iceman, and Beast. But the real most popular guys, most of them first appeared in Giant Size X-Men, Colossus Storm, Nightcrawler. Wolverine technically first appeared in Incredible Hulk 181. But, yeah, he really mattered once that happened. But Lynn Wine and Dave Cockram,

they design these characters and set them up. But what really takes off, like the X-Men still don't, it's not an amazing, start for them but then soon after within a couple years Chris Claremont this unproven young writer comes on to the X-Men and he starts the uncanny era and this is from 77 to 1991 Claremont's run like makes the X-Men what people actually for real super-duper love especially once John Byrne joins him as the artist in 77 like this sets up he defines all the characteristics. The X-Men you see in the 92 X-Men, that's Claremont's X-Men.

They greatly elevate Wolverine as this mysterious main character. They completely change characters like Storm and Gene Gray to be much more interesting. Claremont really was into powerful women, and he wrote women better than just about anybody else in Marvel or DC. Like the Dark Phoenix saga, Magneto as this ultimate anti-hero who also is a survivor of the Holocaust to make him, you know, this kind of dark figure. You've got the Hellfire Club. You got Days of Future Past. Kitty Pride, Proteus, Alpha Flight, all these just amazing, amazing moments.

I want to camp out on Kitty Pride for a second as an entry point for the X-Men because one of the things that I think made the X-Men appeal to me as a kid and one of the reasons why I think that it appeals to children even outside of, you know, outside of the metaphor as just like a straight white kid, was that it was a school. So we got to watch the story of Kitty Pride joining, and it, you know, putting all the baggage aside, it felt a little Harry Pottery, you know, but without all the awfulness. Yes. You know, without the racial stereotype bankers and stuff. It was just like, oh, I could join that.

Like, I could go to bed and fantasize. Like, if I were a mutant who was going to Xavier's, well, would my powers be? And I got to read the story of Kitty, like, meeting all the people and everything. Yeah. That was really cool to have this onboarding. Professor X's Dumbledore, but he lived, damn it. Yes. Spoilers.

But yeah, you never know that some morning you might wake up and lasers might shoot out of your eyes. And then, you know, a magic secret telepath will come and say, hey, join my school. Your parents don't understand you. I'm your dad now. I'm your dad now, yes. One thing that surprised me going over the history of the X-Men as an outsider

is that it took almost 10 years for adaptations to start. Like, 1989 is a key year. maybe that's due to Marvel mismanaging things. I don't know why it took so long, but to me as a kid, when X-Men, the cartoon debuted, I'm like, oh, this is a new thing. And then when I played the arcade game, I'm like, well, who are some of these people I've never

seen before? Yeah. No, well, so yeah, the short version is that this came from our animation research too was that, you know, Claremont's writing this X-Men book all through the 80s it becomes the top seller at Marvel by the end of the decade. And it's

just bigger and bigger. It also defines like event comics like the X-Men for better and worse would do like oh well this is like a 17 part crossover and you got to buy every issue of it and oh and all the X-Men are going to die this month or all like it created these event

comics as about as big as anybody and I think through Marvel productions their animation arm and their work with toy companies they've learned that the X-Men tested really well with kids and so by the late 80s they're like we need

to have an X-Men cartoon to sell toys like G.I. Joe. Like, they were going to G.I. Joe the X-Men. They did the 89 pilot with Toe Animation that they didn't sell. And before that, they were making money hint over fist on Muppet Babies. Yes, yes. Yeah, they could see, they saw all this money. What if they could make the X-Men that? And yeah, it's this one-two punch of like it wasn't that they couldn't sell pride of the X-Men is what they ended up calling the pilot. But they still got a toy run started in 91, which.

toy biz and then they got uh instead of working with through marble production itself they started working with saban and saban uh licensed that out and that's where the it really started but yes what gary mentioned earlier a huge thing was that after john bird left clermont will get bigger and hotter artist on the x-men books and x-men by the end of the 80s was known for having the hottest artist who drew in a way that was like very splashy and and in your face and also broke They broke all these rules that Marvel had set up for a long time. It's why there was a Marvel House style. And then these guys got away with breaking it.

And Jim Lee was the main guy. Like Jim Lee, on his name, when they launched adjective-less X-Men, as Gary pointed out, that sold in the millions. Like over a million copies, it was this new speculator booming comics driven a lot by X-Men. And the X-Men, everybody, most people love in design-wise, is Jim. Jim Lee's design of those characters that they were just like straight up stolen from him by Saban and used as a character models

for the 92 TV show which I think in part led to him quitting the company and starting image comics with a bunch of other guys. And they're in most of these games too, the Jim Lee designs. Yeah, but I mean that's it's so funny there's definitely with the Capcom ones it's this funny circle where

Jim Lee who is a Korean American artist he was also one of the first in The Professional Sphere for Marvel or DC who was like, no, I love Japanese comics and video games. I kind of want to put that style into there. So, like, his design

of the psychic ninja siloac is very much inspired by the Japanese media he was enjoying. And then on the other side of it, once they start making games of it, they're like, oh, this Jim Lee guy designed a cool character, Silak.

Let's put this character in there. You can definitely tell the trends of the time by seeing who is and who isn't in these games like when new characters appear. I do want to talk about where they are now in terms of are they still on IP hell? It's always confusing to me where they always existed independently

of the Marvel movies. And those movies are much worse even though I'm not a huge fan of the Marvel movies. I know they're bad. Now they're associated with some pretty bad people as well. That too. So they kind of need a fresh start.

What's like what's going on there? Well, the short version is that for the last 20 years, Fox had the rights to the Marvel, to X-Men a very favorable deal to them because they made the deal when Marvel was going bankrupt and it was something that the Greater Marvel Company really hated

that Fox had all these rights to stuff that they wished they hadn't sold and so there was certainly editorially behind the scenes there was a move to de-emphasize the X-Men they in storyline had a cap on how many mutants there are in the world there was a no more mutants edict

and they even tried to like say like trying to make in humans a thing? They tried to make it humans, the replacement. Nobody bought it. And then, so yeah, the X-Men. And that also did extend two video games after 2011. There were no real X-Men video games. They were barely appearing in stuff.

But then, thanks to the wonderful media consolidation that happens every day in this country, Disney bought Fox, thus getting back the X-Men rights. And so for the past few years, the X-Men have been on the ramp up, like you're starting to see them in more video. games. You see their comics getting a bigger push. And they have not appeared yet in Marvel Cinematic Universe. But Kevin Feige, the lord of that world, has said, we've got plans for mutants. It's just a matter of time. Coming soon to hyperX.com, HP.com, and more fine retailers, the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless. The Cloud Alpha Wireless gets up to 300 hours of battery life

so you'll spend less time charging your headset and more time charging into the action. The Dual chamber drivers enhanced by premium DTS Headphone X spatial audio provide reduced distortion, allowing you to hear audio cues with pinpoint precision. Up to 300 hours of battery, two chambers, zero wires, the new HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless. It's time to tap in with the HyperX QuadcastS microphone. The stunning HyperX QuadcastS features dynamic, customizable RGB lighting, a convenient tap-to-mute sensor, and four selectable pole. polar patterns, so we can broadcast crystal clear audio, whether you're gaming, streaming,

podcasting, or impressing your remote colleagues and classmates. So what are you waiting for? Join the Quad Squad and tap in today with the HyperX Quadcast S microphone. I guarantee you that within two years there will be a Simpson short on Disney Plus where Skinner is Professor X. And let's say Ralph is Wolverine. I'm sure that's how he'll shake out. It's going to be brutal.

But so that, yeah, that's where they're at at this very moment. I think we're about to see it's weird because, yes, us millennials love the X-Men or at least have fond memories of them because, you know, the 80s to the year 2002 or so, they were gigantic. And then slowly they've been scaled back and made less important, even though they were still around. like, you know, everybody loved that Hugh Jackman X, Logan movie, for example. But, but yeah, and that, and same with like, they were licensing fewer X-Men games. Though, of course, that 2011 X-Men game,

I don't, I don't blame them for stopping X-Men games for a while after X-Men Destiny. Ooh, was that, was that the, uh, it's a wretched game? That's a Silicon Knights one that, uh, legally can't exist anymore. Right. Like, yep, so your, your copies at least worth some money if you owned X-Men

Destiny. Uh, nothing of value was lost there. Nope. Anything else we need to talk about in terms of the history. The one thing I think is just interesting, and this is a side note as it relates to games, but because it's had this IP obscurity, I feel like there have been many times in the comics where they've kind of relaunched in things that feel very anti-commercial. The current stuff that's going on with X-Men comics is Byzantine and weird and experimental and requires a lot of history, like it's in conversation with the entire run, in a way that would never work for a moment. movie you'd never be able to adapt it into anything and I'm curious as it gains kind of more traction with other media you know as they start being able to make games and movies again if they're going to have to dial back like I feel like we're a year or two away from just hey it's a school with Professor X at it you know them just starting over with it because

since then there have been a lot of periods that have been really weird the current one is the weirdest but like Grant Morrison's run in the early 2000s is a real favorite of mine that is very strange and does a lot of risks there have been a lot of little side paths that are really cool. I love ecstatics Oh, I love ecstatics. I love ecstatics. Yeah. No, I think. Statics is one of my favorite

comics of all the time. I think Morrison understood at least in his run too that like it's some people forget how horny Chris Claremont's run was and they kind of horn it down and I like and Graham Morrison understood like no the X-Men also is about like budding sexuality or like a horny like it's about Logan

wanting to fuck Gene Gray but but also Cyclops kind of wants to fuck the white queen as well and they it is it is about sex to a big degree including you know that Hellfire Club that I think speaks to

a real interest of Chris Claremonts I'll say you can Google for more info on that yes Let's talk about the history of the history of games. So again, they didn't really start until the 80s. And the first one doesn't even exist because it was never finished. and it was supposed to be

Quest Probe featuring the X-Men was supposed to be the first X-Men game part of the Quest Probe series of graphical text adventure games we talked about that in our Spider-Man game series because that's where Spider-Man games were in the mid-80s. I watched some videos of this

this tells me like something tells me Gary would be into these games. I don't know if you played the Quest Probe games, Gary. Just a little bit before my time and before I got a PC. They're of academic interest to me but I've never managed to get very far when I've tried to play them legit. They look really cool. They're clunky. They're neat. It's a neat

concept for sure. There are just kind of quality of life things they're missing. Yes. You know, like I like I'm an old PC game sicko, but like not that much of a sicker. Yeah, it's sort of like what child Tom Hanks is playing at the beginning of big. This is the kind of game it is. And it's kind of funny because watching videos of these, you're not just saying, I want to go north. I want to open this. you're telling a superhero what to do. So it's really like a bossing around a superhero simulator for the most part.

It's like, Spider-Man, go north. He's like, okay. Yeah, which, again, I never, I never like these. I said this on the Spider-Man one, but I never liked these types of games as a kid because, like, no, I don't want to be Spider-Man's friend in a game. I don't want to ask Spider-Man, what do you think, Spider-Man? I'm Spider-Man. I want to be Spider-Man or The Thing or Wolverine and fucking slash shit. I don't want to tell him.

What do you think we'll read? Someone's just jealous because they didn't pick up a mint copy of Comptroller of Spider-Man number one. Like I did. Hey, that's a neglecting position, I think. Yeah, so QuestPro. You're going to have the budget for that Spider-Man? Time will tell. The Crest Probe series had two games before this.

So actually, no, I think it was three. So there was Spider-Man, there was the Hulk, and then there was also Human Torch and the Thing. So not the entire Fantastic Four, just half of them. And X-Men was going to be the fourth game, presumably released in 86 or 87, but it never came to pass because the Quest Probe company went out of business. But the story intended to be in that game was adapted into a comic series in Marvel fanfare number 33. That was July of 87. So the story meant to take place within this text adventure game, a graphical text adventure game, does exist in comic form. And there was a Quest Probe line of tying comics as well that was Kansas.

So this was a big push to get these Marvel characters in the PC adventure game market. Wow, Claremont wrote that. So Marvel fanfare was, Marvel had this practice that they paid people to write potential fill-in issues because in case something got late, they're like, just use that fill-in issue. But if a fill-in issue got too out of date, they're like, then we'll publish it in fanfare. And it's just a one-off story that doesn't matter. So that's where so, but that's so funny. It got published there. I see it was written by Claremont.

That's big, but then it's, it's a woman as the artist June Brighman, which tells me that they did not see it as that important because they weren't known for giving women the best assignments at Marvel comics back then or now even, I'd say, you know what? Let's just say now. But that's good to know that that's where the story came from. That means that Claremont was involved in some way, which is interesting to me, yeah. But yeah, this game, it would have come out in 1987. it would have been the first X-Men game so it took them quite a while I believe that Spider-Man Atari-2600 game

was like 1981 or 82 yeah yeah so he was getting games a lot earlier and so was Superman and yeah let's move on to the first real game that actually came out that's bad and it's the uncanny X-Men that came out for the Nintendo in 1989 developed by we don't really know it's really hard to find like the game developer

research institute can't figure this out so I figure no one can there's some clues as to who might have developed We just know a Japanese developer, perhaps just one person. It kind of feels like that. They're the ones who put this together. But it was published by LGN. Lewis J. Norman. I publish games.

Oh, that guy, man. No, I can't. It's hard to put into words how this affect me because I think it was the first time I felt betrayed by a video game as a kid. Like, I thought all video games were good. And I think I probably saw an ad for. it in like a 1990 comic book or 91 even I didn't get it when it was brand new but I then like

see it on the rental shelf and the cover is looks just like the X-Men I'm like great yeah it's a perfect cover so I was like mom rent this for me this is going to be the greatest thing ever me and my brother I call I call Wolverine and then we started up and heartbroken

heartbroken it feels it feels like it's bad on like a dare level like it's like a Ludum Dairy project to make the worst X-Men game almost like it's really bad. Yeah. It's hard to, it's hard to overstate.

The LGN games... The LGN games were a real crap shoot because they used so many developer. Lewis J. Norman was not making these things himself. He was just selling them. So a few things, I mean, none of them were great, but I think games like Jaws and Friday the 13th that we have podcasted about before,

they have interesting concepts that can't get fleshed out because there's no time or money. Then you get things like Back to the Future, Beam Software, just like a terrible, terrible game that also broke a lot of hearts. And this is another one where it's like they rolled the dice and this one came back pretty rotten. And yeah, it's like, it's infamous in that it's so disappointing

because little kids wanted to play an X-Men game and this was it for a while. And something about this tells me that there's nothing on the record, but I'm guessing it was probably produced in conjunction with that Pride of the X-Men thinking it would be a TV series. So, hey, there's going to be a TV series on the air. Thanks to that pilot, it's going to be successful. And of course, kids can play the game after they watch the series.

But, you know, that didn't come to pass. It's also, it's bad in an uninteresting way in the LJN context. Like, even bad LJN, like you mentioned a couple good LJN games that were made. Even things like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and stuff are not. That's not a great game, but it's really interesting. Like, it does something. This game does nothing. Like, there's, it's cool that you can play different characters in it, kind of.

But it, other than that, like, there's no, like, weird hook to it. Well, and I, like, it's not an ambitial. vicious. I think Bob's right on that timing and probably greenlit it because they were working on the animated. They would have been working on both in like 88 for an 89 release, but I think to the, when you look at the cover, at a certain point it changed, they're like, okay, then just draw the X-Men basically as they appear in the comics right then because Colossus is off model for the pride of the X-Men design, but he's on model for how he was in the comics at the time. and his big, big metal shirtless outfit that I enjoyed. And also, Storm is in her Mohawk period. Right, yeah. Which is not their more classic design from Pride of the X-Men.

So, though I couldn't, even with my eye for who was drawing X-Men at the time, I can't place who did it. It could just be they hired one of their regular guys and said do it. But if I were to guess any regular artist on X-Men at the time, it looks like a very toned-down art Adams or Silvestri, as in, like, color inside the lines kind of style. But I think it could just be LJN hired just any, their regular graphic designer to do it.

I'm surprised they commissioned new art and then just ask for some assets. To give this game some credit, there's a few cool ideas that are obviously not really fleshed out. Like, you can choose any level up front. There's only four, but hey, maybe it was just harder to program them in order to play. Who knows?

It feels like you're playing a debug mode for this game, actually. Oh, well, yeah. Something I didn't, when I learned how the five, level goes, I was like, yeah, this is just a debug mode. They didn't build a real game in here. They didn't finish it. You can play a six characters, so I want to go over the characters in every game. So in this game, it's Cyclops and Wolverine. Those are the constants.

And then we have Storm, Colossus, Iatman, and Nightcrawler. But functionally, there are two kind of characters in this game. There's projectile characters which are good, and then melee characters which are bad. And for some reason, you would think, oh, for the sake of balance, every character would have a special ability. That's true of the future games, but not this one.

Because it's like, well, Storm and Iceman can fly and Nightcrawler can walk through walls, but everyone else is kind of screwed. Like, you think they would give everyone a special ability, but they didn't because they didn't really care. And the sad part about playing a six characters is that every X-Man is the exact same sprite, but with different colors. Now, I can see them getting away with this because if you're playing this on a CRT TV with a crappy connection in 1989, these sprites are so, so small. And you can convince yourself like, that's Wolverine on the screen. Squint hard enough.

It's like an Atari game. Yes. Like, everything is very abstract. it feels like they dispatched the X-Men to go fight assets in general like just let go fight some sprites there's been there's been an asset's uh virus happening in the in the danger room and the X-Men are so flashy that you like they're especially at 89 you're playing them to see the X-Men not to have a top-down

thing that's like you know a much shittier like Contra or smash TV you know I also as a kid I was not that into top down games anyway because I don't want to see the top of Wolverine's head I want to see him like how he appears in the comic page

and like you said Bob the melee guy sucked and I don't want to I did not like playing a game where Wolverine my favorite X-Man at the time sucked so hard as he did in that game another cool thing about this game is

which doesn't really play out very well but it's a mandatory to play a game in that you know you can play with a friend or your little brother. I don't know if you play this with your brother, Henry. It did function well for that. I will say it was a good little brother game, yes. But there's also an interesting gimmick in that if you don't have a second player,

the CPU takes over the other player. But an NES game for 1989 on this budget has the worst AI possible. So most of the strategies I've heard about this game is like, yeah, pick the lesser character you want to die as your CPU buddy because they're not going to make it. Oh, God. Now, it was kind of that Ninja Turtle's math in that game as well. Like, you eventually learn you want to play as Donatello, not Raphael.

Same deal here. Like, even if you don't particularly like Cyclops or a night crawler, you know that they're way better to play as, yes. Save your Donatello's for the future. So, yeah, this game is just, I consider it barely designed because when I'm looking at the playthrues of this, it's just like, well, each level is technically different in terms of color choices, but there's nothing there to indicate what they actually are, unless you're reading the description in the manual.

The enemies have nothing to do with X-Men. they just seem to be placed haphazardly. There's no real sense of design to this game. And, yeah, the enemies are just off-brand as well. I guess you fight some bosses that are X-Men villains. But, again, the sprites are so small and indistinct. They could really be anything in this game. They're just suggesting to you it's Magneto or whatever, yeah.

It's a red blotch. There's such a disparity between how the levels look and what they're named. Like, they're named, like, album tracks on a queen album or something. Yeah. Future City Street Fight. battle through a living starship sorry Gary I interrupted you like don't mind if I do

yes and then but then it's just a big gray swath of garbage and it's so bad and for some reason these X-Men games a few of them they broke the fourth wall in ways I kind of appreciate but that made the games really frustrating and weird so in order to access the fifth hidden stage in this game

you have to first defeat a certain number of special enemies in every level now when any of these levels end they show you you a text message telling you certain information. If you defeat the certain number of enemies, some of those words will be highlighted in red.

You have to keep track of those words. And then once you beat all four stages, you put together all of the red words that you saw, and that will form a sentence that kind of indicates what you're supposed to do because basically the sticker message tells you, and I will quote this from the game, the last mission

can be reached from the mission screen by pushing select and seek the advice of the label to make it to the final mission. So, you know so beating these four levels, it just tells you push select at some point at the mission select screen. And then you look at the label of the game, which is a very cogent a choice

like eight years before, nine years before I'll go solid. The label says B plus up together with start, which is not very helpful. So the real way to get to the actual final level is to hold B plus up plus select and then push start while you're holding in all

of those buttons, which is sort of what those two message indicate, but not really. You really have to be creative with your interpretation of them. And again, I was eight, my little brother was five. We weren't figuring this out. We were never going to, I mean, I'm happy this was a rental, and we could just play those

first four levels up front and go like, this sucks mom, return it. Like, just give a, or we wouldn't have said sucks to our mom. We would have said, like, this is crummy. Can we get something else? I don't think it was even copy protection or just a fun way to avoid people ripping this off or selling it in a different way because it's on the

cartridge. Yeah. I don't, I mean, it's a cool idea, but whose idea was this? Oh, sorry, Gary. No, no, I was just agreeing with you. It is a weird little splash of ambition that is in the meta and not at all in the gameplay. I, you know, this like, neat idea. I can also see from a design standpoint, maybe it really was. They're like, we do not know how to sequentially make the game understand that you beat four levels and then see the last one. And, you know, And so we can either make the last level available from the front screen or we just put the debug code on the box and that's how people get to the last level

that it not make it the first choice on the screen. It was a real like janga of programming they had. Yeah. We technically can't put the last level on the select screen. Don't ask me, please. But yeah, that is it for the NES game. Awful. It's real bad and you watch on a YouTube video about it now.

Everyone hates it. But here's a good game. The first truly good, X-Men game is the arcade game simply entitled X-Men. Now, where did the uncanny come from? Was the line of books called uncanny? Yes. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It started as the uncanny

X-Men because, you know, it was the Mighty Thor, the amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the uncanny X-Men. A word that no one really uses ever. They are uncanned. Fresh out of the can. But yes, a very cool brawler, the Konami

Brawler X-Men, released to the arcades in the spring of 92, so six months before the Fox Kids cartoon started, that started in October of 92, so I didn't see this probably until the cartoon was on the air. And it made me wonder, why is Wolverine Brown, who are some of these people, are Dazzler? I know Jubilee. Is Dazler like her other alter ego? This really confused me as a kid because this was very much inspired by that 89 pilot in terms of the character designs and the characters they chose to be playable for this game. And all the villains to and the main design of it. Yeah, it's the, they, uh, I mean, you can, you can definitely

tell that Konami was handed the series Bible for the planned pride of the X-Men series. And I, well, great. Here's character models for everybody from every design. We just put them right in there. They're bright and colorful. You have a fight. And then otherwise, if we got to make up others, well, fortunately, in the comics, the X-Men fight robots. Those robots are normally much taller than they appear in this video game. But the Sentinels, regardless, are a perfect video game nemesis for, you know, Spider-Man games, they got to make up a lot of robots for him to fight because you got to punch things till they die.

Yeah. But Spider-Man and the X-Men, other than Wolverine, don't kill people. So they got to destroy robots the entire time. But yeah, I, everything I said about me and my brother's reaction to that uncanny X-Men game, opposite for this game. This was our favorite game. We loved it so much. One of our happiest days ever was when my mom said

she would put tokens in it until we beat it. And we got to see the end of that game. It was the greatest. I love this game so so much. I just played it last year all the way through again when I went to the Galloping Ghost Arcade Museum in Chicago and played through it a very well-maintained six-player version of the machine.

It's my, this might be the first arcade game I beat. Oh, wow. And it was my, it was my favorite for a really long time, like all-time favorite. Like, it's so beautiful. Yeah. You know, you see it from across the arcade. And I'm just like, oh, that's, you know, these sprites are big and colorful. They're doing really cool moves.

The sound effects are great. And not just the, like, ah, which is the obvious one that colossus noise, which is great. yeah all of them sounds super cool uh every every sound effect is great um the character selection is really good and you play with six players which i know is a note later in the notes but like that was huge getting together with six people you know five other people to play this feels like an x-men thing like you feel like a team you can kind of coordinate a little bit uh you know in in a way that you could do with turtles as well but being like hey go grab that guy or you know go cover cover him something like that like it felt like an x-men experience it's a it's a full

birthday party at an arcade of kids that can play it together. This game, yeah, it did call to you from across the arcade because I think Konami, their Ninja Turtles game was the first four-player game I ever saw in an arcade and I was like, you can play with four people, wow! And then

they had the Simpsons, of course, the year before this, and because they didn't have a street fighter to their name, they really were sticking with brawlers for a few more years. So, yeah, they really knew what they were doing in this genre and we talked about it just briefly here but the six player version is so cool so big because the monitors were just so big and hot one is actually in the bottom of the cabinet and there's a mirror pointed at it so there's always a weird split so you have your TV next

to a mirror that's reflecting the TV that's pointing upwards from the bottom of the cabinet but it's always so fun to see like one side is always a little darker yeah oh no what you can tell when you could start seeing one fade more than the other like as a kid I didn't know why But that was part of the magic trick. Like, that's what I loved about, too, because it was very widescreen game, but they had to fake it because they didn't have tube TVs were still just squares there pretty much back in 1992.

It was like an old DS, one of the first Ds is. A horizontal, sorry, vertical, no, horizontal D. I was right the first time. So, yeah, there's not a lot to talk about in terms of game design because Konami had figured this out. I think with Ninja Turtles won, the 89 brawler, they're like, well, this is. the formula we use

we have very flashy 2D graphics we have a lot of sound effects and you know sound samples we have cinema scenes and we are pretty faithful to the brand you're gonna see everything that the licensor gave us

you're gonna see that in this game and I mean I'm not that familiar with X-Men so I just have to assume that's true but yeah it's very faithful to what X-Men was then I assume Gary sorry oh yeah no no just just went up in you sorry okay just yeah this is very faithful that's good this looked like you know

the characters who I had seen. Yeah. I didn't see Pride of the X-Men until way later. I didn't see that as a pilot. I saw that as a jaded adult who was like, what's this weird old cartoon? But they look on model for the comics as well. Like, oh, that is Pyro and his powers work like Pyro's powers work.

Yeah, I loved Pride of the X-Men. That was a VHS. I wore out. And so I actually did watch it before we played this game. And so it was like, oh, this is the real X-Men to me. Like, I do these X-Men way before I read, the comics and it helped too that like yeah the pride of the x-men they didn't mess around with perfection they're like you know what the 1984 design of these characters and their costumes let's

just do that they just look really good why why embellish you know and it's mostly lived on through certain memes because you know it's a japanese developed arcade game there's going to be some fun voice samples even though these are english language voice actors someone in a booth still said welcome to die yes yeah and later in the game when you fight Magneto at the end that's like chopped up that sample and he says X-Men come to die so it's a fun way of saying I'm going

to kill you come to die nothing moves the blah nothing moves nothing moves that these are all ringing to my head for 30 years yeah yeah we'll get to one of them that really echoed through arcades at least in my mind later in this list in this game

did come there was no home port in 90s of course because there were certain exclusivity rights but in December of 20 Backbone Entertainment published a version of this for PS3 and 360, which was, I assume, just basically Arcade Perfect, but that was delisted on basically the final week of 2013. So you had a good three-year window to buy that. And maybe you still have it. I didn't actually pick it up then. I picked it up.

They did have to redo all the voice samples. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Because they obviously, Konami, Konami's pretty famous for not signing deals and not thinking about the future with their old stuff. and a similar situation there with that, which is too bad. But, yeah, I mean, the imitations are just as good. And it allowed, like, HD, like, seeing the HD images of, like, especially the start screens of, like, everybody together.

It's just some of my favorite, like, video game art ever. Whenever I worked at a website that I could talk about this game, I'd be like, all right, straight to gamepress. Dot biz or whatever that place was and get the official HD source of these images from that game. Yeah. But like with the TMNT and Simpsons games, once you can download them and not have to put quarters into it, the shallowness reveals itself to a degree. Yeah, you kind of get bored about 60% of the way in because there's no money on the line. Take a time machine back to before the world went to hell around the year 2000.

The 80s and 90s were so rad. The movies, the music, the TV, the games? That's what I want to talk about. If you're cool enough. Join us and listen to less than 2000, because that's all we talk about. Adam and Chad live less than 2000. part of the Hyper X. Podcast Network.

Previously on Chat of the Wild. Good to know. I wanted to use this time to impart some words of wisdom from Eslo. Straighten up your hair once I'm gone. You got a style all over the ladies. La La La La La La La are the words to his new hit single, Live Long, Love Long. And also, he woke up from a dream where he forgot to study for the test. Did he really say all those things?

Yeah, yeah. These are all things. that I discussed. He discussed with me. That's magical. Chat of the Wild. Breaking down Zelda and Zelda-like games, one dungeon at a time.

Wednesdays on the HyperX podcast network. Live long, love long, baby. Words of wisdom. Let's move on to one I have mixed opinions about, even though it was a system seller at the time, also titled X-Men, that was the 1993 Genesis game. Developed by Western Technologies Incorporated and published by Sega. And up front, I know people like to slam me for my Sega bias, or sorry, anti-Sega bias. But this falls into a category of games I really dislike that were very popular on the Genesis, and that was European-style platformers.

It's like every one of these games is like a hard version of, an even harder version of Earthworm Gym or something. It's just a style of platformer I don't like. And I don't think it's just me because I was going on to YouTube after checking this game out again for the first time in a long, time thinking, I hope people aren't in love with this game. It's not very good. And then I'm seeing a lot of YouTubers, the reviews that they have, they're all pretty negative about this game,

but they admit, like, no, I came to this game and I thought I loved it. Coming back to it, it's not that great. Just like Aladdin or Spider-Man on the Genesis. Yeah. No, I have the same experience with the Spider-Man game that was on the Genesis, too, where I on one level liked that it was

even truer to the comics, and this game was, too. but then actually playing the levels I'm like why am I lost? Why am I like and I it is because I was Ray Super Mario Brothers was the first game I truly loved and that is what I think the platformer should be I don't like the European

design sense as much especially the idea of like I have to search for 16 widgets to finally get to have a door open that I already walked to like that but the positives I liked about this I can also see why Sega did this because

getting Spider-Man was huge for the Genesis in 91 and so here's the X-Men in 93 the year after their TV show and their toys are doing crazy good and it did feel special to me when it was new because on the roster like well

my brother's favorite was Gambit and this you could finally play as Gambit in a video game which that felt new at the time now you can play as any character in any video game anytime you ever want they're all in Fortnite everything is made for you

yes yeah but any memories of this game gary i played this uh you know at the time it came out and was a little lukewarm on it the same um this is moving ahead a little bit but just getting my piece out the sequel to this is way better like this is that that kind of platformer sense that you're talking about i also see and i think part of it is uh it comes with big sprites you'd also run into it with like sygnosis games yeah yeah yeah like you didn't get enough lead and then you'd get enemies would get cheap shots because the sprites are too big um and that was that was a real problem but The second, I kind of, if there's going to be a critical evaluation, I want it to be at the sequel to this because I think it solves a lot of problems in this game. The level design is a little bit better. The characters are more interesting. Their powers are more useful. It feels more fair. It's a much better game.

I didn't actually check out the sequel. It's good to hear that they made it an improved version of this because I was not impressed by what I saw of this game, what I remember playing. And I remember this being a big Genesis kiosk game, like at the mall. they would be showing this off because it came at a very important time. It really does. And it came out at an important time where there was like an 18 month golf of time,

maybe like 14 months, but it felt much longer, between Sonic 2 and Sonic 3. And the two big games to fill that golf were Aladdin and this. They were the big flashy Genesis games that were filling the gap between the next Sonic release.

And yeah, I also like the colorful designs and characters like Wolverine had his yellow costume just like in the cartoon. They were in. the danger room which i was like oh the danger room wow the cool super danger room like and uh now i don't like it's music but at the time its music sounded like oh how cool like uh and and yeah there's a note you had here bob that reminded me like that this really did feel like a big deal to me then

wolverine regenerates health now this is a major uh design thing with wolverine he was too ahead of his time yeah in the character in the comics he always regenerated health but back in the 90s, designing that into a game, it breaks some of the game. Like, if you can just heal by standing still, that changes how you design a level. But then, by 2005, 6, Wolverine's like, yeah, it's my time now. Everybody regenerates health in video games. That's true. He was really a pioneer in getting your health back.

The developer of this game, though, I do want to mention them because they seem pretty interesting in that they probably shouldn't have been making this game. So Western Technologies Incorporated. Nobody knows what that is. I had to look it up and do some research on them. They were known for their interesting uses of Sega's hardware, specifically the sound hardware. So before this, their three notable titles were the Sports Talk series

where there would be play-by-play, very, very primitive play-by-play, but news broadcasters talking to you or sports broadcasters talking to you about what just happened through a bunch of voice samples. And I think they help with development of the light gun, the menacer, and the software. for the menacer and they were also behind the development of the Vectrix hardware which lets you know where they were

in terms of game development. Man, I mean, that's just Sega in general that of like trying 800 different things and just releasing them and see what happens. Like, that's why they, that's why Sega fucking fluid, man. I mean, Sony was going to show up one way or the other but it's like that five years

Sega had it and they just let it slip through their fingers because they just didn't know what they want. They wanted to be everything. Like, and that, with this game is just another great example of that. Yeah. You know, the big thing as far as an appeal of this, and this doesn't hold up now because you can play as everyone, is that roster.

And I like that they include the other X-Men as summons. Yeah. It's the same trick that Captain America and the Avengers did in the arcade. And it's a real clever way to make something feel like a more true to the property game than it is within the confines of what they're able to do. Yeah, I did. It's a real clever touch. And I also, you know,

know, this was, I mentioned this in the Spider-Man one, but there was the Spider-Man X-Man crossover game where they fought Arcade, and that at least showed that the licensor, the second they saw like a list of villains they could face, like, wait, there's a guy named Arcade who builds like a pinball machine, you fight him in there, that's made for video game. Yeah, what are we doing? And the same goes for Mojo. Like, Mojo is a big, fat metal, cyborg man who makes people star in TV shows.

So he's like literally a guy who would build a boss fight room. I forgot about Mojo. I did not like seeing him in these games. He's really unpleasant looking. I know we talked about Spider-Man and the X-Men arcades revenge, the Spider-Man thing. In looking through this, I reviewed it. And I forgot that in the beginning, Spider-Man notices all the X-Men get kidnapped, except for Gambon who's sucked up into a garbage truck.

Right, right. And I have no idea why he's singled out to be sucked up into a garbage truck. I believe that's because they, I believe that's because they just redrew John Burns' pages, but Gambit wasn't on those pages so they had to like make it up for Gambit I believe that's why two I don't know

garbage truck eats him sure two minor things about this game one it's very hard like I mentioned before in that it has like a real Ninja Turtles for NES style but much much more difficult

and that you have four X-Men you can switch between them I think you're limited to how many times you can switch between them and you don't get your health back at the end of a stage and once you lose an X-Men he's gone forever

and there are no continue. So at least the Ninja Turtles won for the NES. If the dam kills you, you start over at the beginning of that damn level. You don't have to go back to the very beginning of the game.

And yeah, this is in league with all of these other uber hard European platformers. That no continues thing when you said that it hit me like a punch the gut like I remember the,

again, this was a rental. We didn't buy this. But when we hit my brother and I were doing a tradeoff like, okay, I'm Wolverine, now you're nightcrawler and all that. But when we hit that no continues thing we're like wait what like this we just expected games have

continues you're supposed to be given that given one extra chance and you can play on an easier difficulty but magnino won't let you uh get past more than a few levels yeah that's right yeah i remember that was bullshit too they just cop the same like uh it reminded me of me my brother and i playing streets of range three and then the game laughs at you like you fucking loser you can't fight you can't really face this guy you didn't play on the harder difficulty mom the game's making fun of me again one other chicken hat. Yes, there was no chicken hat.

I would have suffered with a chicken hat through a lot of games if they just let me, you know, get to the end. But one other cool thing about this game, but also not very cool in ways that it's, you know, frustrating and unintuitive is that you have to do something very strange to finish this game. And that after the Mojo Boss Fight, you find this computer screen. Once you destroy it, it says reset the computer. And there's no real context for that. Is there a computer within the game? Is there a computer, you know, somewhere in a level I need to find?

No, what you literally need to do, and this is kind of cool in one way, is that you need to reset your genesis. Now, you can't just hold the reset button in. You have to tap it. So right there, there's a problem. But I think just saying reset the computer is so vague, this feels like it was made to support a hint line. I think you're right.

And it would, even if I don't think my brother and I ever got to that point where we would have gotten that hit, But even if one of us had floated the idea to the other of like, well, let's try resetting the system. You know that's against rules. You never do that. You have been trained. At this point, we have been trained for like six years of video game playing to know. You never press reset unless you want to fully reset the game. Yeah, especially once you get to the-

Kevin McAllister's brother does to troll you. Yes. Like comes in and taps it. Yeah. It's weird, though, because it's got that Kojima kind of element to it you're talking about. just the communication wasn't there. You know, the sequel, like, was obsessed with this, too. The sequel to this game starts with a cold open.

When you turn on the Genesis, you were immediately playing a stage and you get your credits after, or your opening title screen after the first stage. It's really weird. Like, they were playing with the box. This developer with this series wanted to do weird stuff. And I respect it. Yeah.

It's not, you know, perfectly executed. Like, intellectually, I respect this for being a cool idea, but if I bought this game for 50 bucks in 1993 and this was stopping me from finishing it, I'd be absolutely pissed off. Yes. Yeah. Completely.

It just kind of reminds me of the way that those kind of, that kind of messing around works as games get better at communicating to you. Like you look at something, for example, how you access the DLC in Dark Souls 1, you know, which is the kind of thing that would not play in a different era where there wasn't the internet where there weren't ways to kind of communicate that. You know, you see these kind of proto versions of those tricks, but without the infrastructure to support it. And it just doesn't work. Yeah, there was no game FAQs in 93. Maybe if you

went on to Prodigy, you could ask somebody for help, but that's about it. I want to move on to the next game, not linger too long on it, because it's kind of a shallow game, but it's still pretty neat. It's X-Men Mutant Apocalypse, developed and published by Capcom. So now Capcom has the license.

Henry, answer me this question. Gary might know too. Did this coincide with the bankruptcy of Marvel? Is that 94? They're on their road to bankruptcy, but it's 96 they go bankrupt. Okay. Because that's when the last Spider-Man game comes out.

and that kind of wipes the slate clean. Capcom got it right before the end. I was going to say because the way Marvel lets Capcom use characters in future games tells me they needed the money. Yes, they were hard up. So yes, I'll all I'll say about this really. It's a perfectly cromulent X-Men game with Mega Man X-S music

because it's by one of the Mega Man X composers. It actually reminds me a lot of the Batman, the animated series game where it's just like big fluid sprites, creative use of the characters, very short, kind of difficult but you know it is a Japanese developer who knows how to make this kind of a license game and they're doing it

and it's like a good B minus of a game I wish I had it over the Genesis game in 93 like I never played this when it was new I did play the Genesis sequel game Gary mentioned as well but this this was more my speed of just like yeah I mean it's there's nothing

fancy about it but this is like you know Capcom saying can we make a simpler final fight. Let's just make a simple final fight. We know how to do that. Sure. And just walk to the right and hit guys. There's some platforming elements too and in the beginning of this game so you can play

as Gambit, Cylock. Scilock has arrived gentlemen. Yes. It's 1990 start your engines. It's cycloc time. Cylock time. And you know what? These artists have a great time drawing this character and there is jiggle in this game. When she first arrives on the scene It's a thick slyc.

Yes. This is it unusually thick silo. It's that Capcom Jun Lee with like the gigantic head crushing thighs that birthed so many young men I like I really like the slightly off model Capcom X-Men art where it gets a little

fetishy where everyone is just like bulging in weird places but they all look like Darkstockers characters in a way No this this starts it but it's the next Capcom game they get more embellished each Capcom game they do but yeah and this I wish I did play this because it was the I think the first

one where Beast was a playable character who I wish I could have played as but So Cylock distracted me So her Cyclops, Wolverine, Beast and Gambit They all have stages designed around their powers Like for the Beast one you can like stick to Ceilings and Walls and things like that And they're like moving platforms where you do that in his stage

And then once you get past that first round of stages You basically select which character you want to choose To go through the rest of them And Apocalypse is the star of the show But really it's magnetism I don't know where Apocalypse came from. He's sort of just like, oh, this is the big bad, but secretly it's Magneto. It comes out at the end to prolong the game.

That's weird. It should really be the reverse. Like not to dis Magneto as I think he is the best X-Men villain. There are tears of power and it's like, Magneto is like, you know, oh, he's a world-level threat. Apocalypse is, you know, universe-level threat. Like he is the most powerful, I guess, onslaughts more powerful, I suppose. those, but Apocalypse really is the top

super-powered villain of the X-Men. Not my favorite. I like Magneto way more than Apocalypse, but... And unfortunately, there are no credits on this game. I don't know why, but it does really feel like it was made by the Mega Man X team. It feels like of the quality of like Mega Man X-3-ish. So not amazing, but it's still a very pretty,

great music, good use of the characters and just a very cromulent licensed Japanese game from 1994. for. But I do want to move on. Oh, by the way, it also is playable in the arcade one-up collection. Oddly enough, there's just a Super Nintendo game thrown on there for some reason. I'm tempted to get that. But I already have one arcade machine. I haven't even built yet. Not until you finish your Sunday, Henry. Sorry, Gary. Any final thoughts on this one before we move on? I mean, my experience with this was very limited. I got into this when, you know, I got into emulation. It was a weird thing, you know, in that kind of the before times, which is

magazines where discoverability was tough. I would have eaten this up. I just didn't know it existed. And I just didn't get the right magazines or walk by the right shelves. It's depressing to think about how... So it was really weird, but I found out about this it was surprising. It's depressing to think about how much the games we played as kids were shaped by

who advertised best to us. Well, I mean, now all Marvel content is a prescription you must take. That was not true in the 90s. I read the newsletter. I go to my two weeks of camp every year now, like a good boy. Whatever you say, Billboard.

So moving on to the next game. It's a joke I've used before, by the way. Moving on to the next game is X-Men Children of the Atom for the arcade in 1994. And yes, this is where Capcom is getting involved in putting these Marvel superheroes into fighting games. And it all starts here. And it was weird how we all were complaining about Capcom can't count the three. When you see all of the crazy fighting games, they made between Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo and then Street Fighter 3. in 1999. There were like all

of these games, a few of which like Marvel superheroes and X-Men versus Marvel superheroes, I completely forgot about. Those are two games I just completely forgot about. It's all X-Men for me in terms of these fighting games. Yeah, they tried so many interesting things and yeah, I never, until

talking about it with you, Bob, I never considered that this was like a response to Mortal Kombat. Like this was well, you know, because Street Fighter already performed well against Mortal Kombat, but Street Fighter didn't have the edge and the American edge

the Mortal Kombat had. And then you include all these sharp, pointy sword guys of the X-Men in it. Like, it is an answer to M.K., I'd say. Yeah, that was my theory because Capcom was like, we don't have to make up five different multi-colored ninjas. We can just borrow the most popular characters all little boys love

in the 1990s. And I do believe around this time that the X-Men animated series was airing in Japan to some success as well. It wasn't that the X-Men were unknown. I have heard from many sources and fandoms of Japanese fandom. It's like Spider-Man was number one and every other American superhero way below that. Like Spider-Man, it'd probably help that there was the 70s Spider-Man Tokusatsu show. But X-Men were building in popularity in Japan at the time, too. And I think it

really helped that like the main character designer for this really understood the appeal of the American comics. And that was Aki-Man? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And he, again, he likes drawing big thighs. And there are some big thighs in this game. But, yeah, 10 characters in this game.

We got Colosses, Cyclops, Wolverine, Ice Man, Storm, Cylock. And then we have some villains as well. We have Omega Red, Silver Samurai, Spiral, and Sentinel, and boss characters in Magneto and Juggernaut. And apparently, this would all lead to the future of Capcom's versus games, but Capcom had a stipulation in that we must include one of our characters in this roster and Marvel agree to that, which is why Akima is a secret character in this game. I will say the first time a friend showed me that character was unlockable, like, we're like, wait, this is like, this is a crossover thing.

We didn't know what we were in for in the future. But those, the villains, this goes all the way to like Schumagorath being in an NBC game. but like Capcom clearly just had a book of the who's who of Marvel or some other character guide and they just picked him by looks like Silver Samurai is like a sea list wolfy enemy like he's kind of lame and Spiral is nothing like Spiral is like a murder world like sidekick to Mojo

like she's nothing but it seemed like they pick like this is a cool character to animate how do you animate combat for a six armed character you know Yeah. Well, it's awesome, too, because it led to that feeling of authenticity for me. And this is a big part of all the arcade fighters that they did in the, and that they would, and X-Men games in general do this, but they will do really deep poles. And I have the feeling that the motivation wasn't to be authentic or to appeal to me, but that's what it did. Yeah. So you end up with things like X-Men video games based on stuff like the Phelings Covenant. And nobody remembers the Phelings Covenant. That wasn't iconic. You know, that didn't move on. You end up with like Mero being in a bunch of things. the Marvel versus Capcom games. And it was like, you're trying to make Merrow a thing, you know, and Merrow didn't, you know, end up being iconic or things like victory poses being, like when cable ends up in Marvel versus Capcom, when his victory poses is his transmode virus taking over.

And that's such an obscure weird thing that nobody, you know, the average arcade player is not going to notice, but I noticed and felt spoke to directly. It just, it just felt really great like they knew me. You know, I know Spiral, they know Spiral. I thought Spiral was a cool character because I've always been a long shot fan and it was just never in a million years would I've guessed

that you would see Spiral in a video game Yeah there's real respect for the source material And what also was really good about this game Another quality is that This is when Capcom was just going nuts with spright art Like this and Darkstalkers is really where it exploded I mean Street Fighter 2 had great spriter But it was a little stiff you know

In these games characters are just always like moving And gesticulating like they're They're idle animations. They're just flexing all over the place. Wolverine like snicting in and out, in and out. Yeah. Like his berserker barrage animation. Like, God, it's so cool.

And I mean, let's face facts. That X-Men 92 cartoon, it doesn't look very good. The designs are too complicated. They didn't give it enough money. It doesn't look good. This is like the one time in the 90s where you're like, that looks like a good animated X-Men. It's the only time I'll see it. And guess what?

You'll be seeing these sprites a lot in the future because Capcom, they hold on to their sprites. You'll get sick of these sprites, really. Yeah. No, it's kind of like when on our Simpsons podcast talking about the Simpsons arcade game, the idea of these very American design sensibilities then translated through the 90s Japanese style aesthetic, especially, you know, the commercial anime aesthetic at the time, adds up to like the perfect thing to our brains anyway. That's absolutely true.

And this had a handful of home ports back in the day, but these Capcom 2D fighting, they came out at an odd time for home consoles because home consoles are moving on to 3D and they weren't as good at doing 2D anymore. So weirdly enough in this time period the Saturn had the better ports. And the PlayStation ports were very compromised even more so with the next game

where they fundamentally change one of the major appeals of the game. This is why my brother, even though we both enjoyed our PlayStation stuff, it was my brother, I got an N64 as a birthday gift, he got a Saturn as a birthday gift, and he was always like, the one thing he could hang in saying,

add on was these are the best version of the Capcom games are on this Saturn machine like you you're he would tell the friends who everybody else didn't own a Saturn and thought it was dumb but for all the PlayStation fans he could say like hey enjoy your your final

fantasies I'm playing arcade perfect Capcom games here buddy all frames of animation are present yeah I've counted I ended up playing a lot more Marvel versus Capcom than this just because of when I ended up at arcades but they're very similar

like you have in the notes here it lays down the groundwork for that kind of run yeah I'm not a fighting game guy so I can't go over all the mechanics and everything I was just there for the characters and the animations

and the music yeah I like the endings of this game and the next one because I feel like they were still allowed to be silly and I mean superheroes we take them very seriously these days

there are modern our modern mythology you could say are superheroes but the endings are very silly I really like the one where it's like a more extreme version of Wolverine holding the picture in bed

where there's a few endings where everyone is very mad that Cyclops and Gene Gray are being lovey-dovey and there's a great ending with Wolverine and he slashes up all the flowers he gave her and then the final thing you see is the picture of Cyclops and Gene Gray with like Wolverine slash marks through it so that's not a great I think that is Wolverine's ending I love yeah I love that like and that extended they only grew overtime in the versus games

Like, it was Capcom, the sense of comedy that the Capcom arcade fighting team had that they brought to, you know, so many wonderful, silly endings of, you know, Zangif dancing with Gorbachev that continues on to this and grows and grows. Ken getting married, all the silly endings. And, you know, like you said, Marvel was at a desperate time here where they, unlike they would do now, saying, that's not respectful to the characters. or if we do jokes about them we do jokes this way that is this is very much like just easy comedy done by also kind of like

Machina like Machina Machina, yeah, yeah It's always fun to see new animations made for endings but it's also fun they just play with what they have too So I do want to move on to the next game so X-Men versus Street Fighter arcade 96 This in 1996 when I was 14 made me do a double take because as I said

before another podcast every day in America it's Game Master Anthony's birthday all your favorite media properties are coming together to wish you a happy birthday and everything is made for you at this point in time

that was not true so when I saw this in arcades for the first time my first thought was they're allowed to do this it seemed like an impossibility these characters have nothing to do with each other

I mean the same companies make games with them but how can they how can these worlds collide but as the as the attract screen says it is the wildest crossover I have never dressed Yes, yeah. It's

that handshake animation between Cyclops and Ryu. It's just like Donald Rubsfeld and Saddam Hussein. That famous photo. I couldn't believe and that it looked that good. Like it was just so shiny and yeah, I mean, you know,

like you said, it only grew from there. So X-Men versus Street Fighter almost seems kind of like small potatoes compared to where the crossovers go. But this, it had to start with this. Like, it success proved why the versus series would be one of their biggest money earners to this day. What's cool about this was this was the first time I'd seen this kind of thing in video games.

In comics, the X-Men were constantly meeting people. Yes. Like I had a novel where they met characters from Star Trek. Yep. You know, both the doctors are called McCoy and it's goofy. You know, and then going into the arcade, it felt a little natural to me, but still really cool to be able to actually play them as a street fighter and X-Men fan. like not only was it two things coming together

it was two things I really loved coming together Yeah it does make sense for Again like my birthday It does make sense for comic characters to cross over To me as a non-comic reader it was just unbelievable And I had to play it to make sure it was real I didn't just have a stroke or something And yeah there were some stages before this

So between Children of the Adam And X-Men versus Street Fighter was Marvel superheroes Which is exactly what it sounds like And then there would later be Marvel versus Capcom Marvel Superheroes versus Street Fighters Sorry And then Marvel versus Capcom

Which is where everyone Really started paying attention I think And we kind of forget about Like the four or five games That came before that But it's all a building block process Up to Marvel versus Capcom

Yeah And they're figuring out balance And how like okay What do you do with these How And this the moves get bigger It gets bigger And more bombastic

Every time too Like the Well I think While the Alpha series Keep staying so grounded And I also think Is these got crazier and crazier with their combos and giant super attacks.

That's why Street Fighter 3 was so, felt so scaled back comparatively when it first debuted. I mean, the point of these fighting games for me as a non-fighting game fan is to basically build up the meter and fill the screen with an attack and maybe I'll win. I just want to see it happen. Yeah, really it was about, I wasn't trying to win. Though definitely when I played against my brother or my pals, I did want to win and felt very mad when I didn't win. But, but yeah, the real payoff for the non-hardcore fighting game guys was just seeing like, well, what does Spider-Man super attack? I always go back, Spider-Man. What is, how big is Cyclops's laser blast going to be this time?

Did they make it any bigger? It's as tall as he is. Like, it's pretty ridiculous. Absolutely. Yeah. They kind of had their cake and ate at two with this series versus the, the Street Fighter 3 on, is that if you're a Street Fighter fan, you could play this very technical. down-to-earth game with like counters and such but you got to see them play in a in a comics world like ryeu got to be or you know street fighter characters in general i kind of fell off with the three

and the ex games but you got to see them do uh this masterful come you know actual kind of fighting stuff where they would do blocks and everything in martial arts and then you got to see them play in the playpen of gigantic spectacle yeah you know they got to have a foot in each pond and it wouldn't work the other way you couldn't have had x-men and have them do hand to hand hand combat that was incredibly technical full of parries. Nobody wants that. You've got to have a berserker barrage. And because of the barrage or bust, like my bumper

sticker says. That's what I heard screaming through every arcade around the side. Berser barrage! And we're in the fighting games arms race right here, which is why one of the huge innovations of this game is tag team playing. Like, you choose two characters, which was the first time they did this in a Capcom fighting game, and you can swap out at any time.

And in fact, you can do, both of your super moves at the same time if you build up your meter far enough if you want to fill the screen with two giant attacks which is exactly the only reason I was playing this game is to see those happen on the screen I don't care I didn't care if I won or lost I want to see what's going on with like

what if Ryu and Cyclops did their thing at the same time and that's why the I mean the rosters were growing bigger and bigger too it could also speaking that arms race like it could also just be like if you I would play this game over Mortal Kombat 3 in a heartbeat but if you were looking at Mortal Kombat 3

just from a value standpoint especially ultimate mk3 you just see a wall of characters like so many different characters in it that you know the the world warriors even in a turbo looks low it looks like a much smaller group that's why the tag team thing was such a great innovation like okay we're going to have these many characters and you also need to think about the combo like you have to pick two characters out of this growing and growing roster and just like earlier with x-men children of the atom this had the superior Saturn version. In fact, in import scenes around the time,

this was legendary because if you bought this and you bought the four megabyte Saturn carts, it would be nearly arcade perfect. And I think it needed that cart to run, but I recall a very brief period of time in that the GameStop family of stores were selling the imports and they were selling the cartridge.

Because the Saturn version did not come to America. This was one of the first video games my brother imported. Wow. We had to, we read either online or in an EGM that the best version was, or the, you have to import this for the Saturn and play it if you want the real version of this.

Like he did, it ended up frying his Saturn's memory thing because Saturn had internal memory on top of the thing you can put in the back to play imported games. You had to put this thing or how we did it was. It was a memory card thing in the back. slot that told it to play imported games and eventually ended up frying it and he lost his

entire save for Shining Force 3 which he is really, really upset him back then. Well, I guess he didn't know they would never bring out any more chapters. Yeah, we didn't. Well, he was like, well, I got to support this. We got to get more. Yeah, and same and just to quote, Dell the funky Homo sapien from his

protoculture song, Bernie Stoller dropped the ball with the ram cartridge. X-Men versus Street Fighter could have expanded the market. You know what? He's right. I believe in what Dell says. Yes, the PlayStation version is bad in that it completely wipes out the big gimmick of this game, not just X-Men and Street Fighter coming together, but the tag team play because I believe the PlayStation version cuts that out completely.

Yeah, yeah, it's just one-on-one. They're like, we're not, this would need load times. We can't put all of this character, all these graphics in the RAM to access at will. It's sad that right when the Saturn can actually, its stupid architecture, or its unique architecture that made it. lose to the PlayStation one of the few times it could win it can't even release the fucking game in america i got that say goes luck for you man i tell you it was the real last time when arcades still had the advantage over home markets because uh you know home consoles are like screw

a two d it's three d or bust and then arcades are basically doing the last best two d graphics of that era just so gorgeous and beautiful lovely yeah that's why hey that and then by the next generation the dream cast can play all these things but nobody wants to play nobody cares. Any final thoughts about this one, Gary, before we move on to our last games on this list? No, no. I played this and liked it, but nothing to add. And this is also available on that one-up arcade cabinet. It also has the licensee price of like $500. So not quite as much as the Simpsons, but you do get four games on there. I don't want one, by the way. Don't send one to me arcade one-up. But this is on there if you want to play this game.

I'll take one. Yeah. Arcade one-up. Maybe if you're listening. Maybe after I move, and this podcast has sold you enough I'll take one but yeah this game just unavailable unless you're emulating it for a very very long time Yeah it was Capcom emulated a lot of the other ones and like they had the Marvel set

But this was one of the ones I can see too why they're like well this is a little redundant And what also I I think you're correct Bob And you know what you say That like they had the Canadian Some of the Canadian voice actors They did get the animated series voice actors

I would bet that probably caused them issues at some point oh i think you're right as a 14 year old i appreciated it because i was not used to seeing you know uh in the ninja turtles arcade games there were just some random guys doing the voices not you know cam clark and rob paulson and what have you Let's move on to X-Men Legends, the series. X-Men Legends, one, and two. These are 2004, 2005, so an unexpected adaptation, but a very interesting one. And I think this is the reason why you wanted to do this podcast, Gary.

I know you talked about these games on podcasts. I was just like sort of like good, good therapy games, a good game to just go through and, you know, chill out too. Why do you like these games so much? These are my favorite X-Men video games. I think this is the best adaptation of the property to me. Because one, I mean, they're just kind of fun, fun games. Like, they're brawlers, but they're a little bit more interesting than ordinarily. But they really emphasize that team aspect, which is really important to X-Men is what separates an X-Men video game from a Batman or Spider-Man game to me.

And it has that element of kind of overall strategy where you're building a team. You know, it's not just a Diablo where I'm, like, doing a build for a character. I'm figuring out a load out of characters that can cover each other's weaknesses and strengths and stuff. And that was really compelling to me, you know, then and now. Like, I think these basically hold up as being pretty fun for that reason. In addition to just being really faithful, tons of weird little details in the flavor text and incidental conversations you can have, deep cuts left and right, tons of, you know,

unlockables that were of the time, like, covers and galleries and missions based on historic comic uh storylines and stuff they just really respected the source material you know which is something that this this franchise does really well uh in general or this line of adaptations uh they just did it really perfectly and made a really fun game to boot and patrick stewarton it was the thing that may be sort liking raven like raven is a is a developer that i will go to bat for um i loved heretic and hexin uh they do the really underrated first person shooter singularity they that that's a really good game that people slept on um they're great yeah and this this owns and then

they were just absorbed to become a call of duty support studio i got one of my one of my favorite memories in the gaming press was when raven software dudes came to preview the wolverine game they really made with that's a podcast for another day but i got to meet them and that was uh you know early enough in my career that i've shamelessly fanboyed out like i love your guys's games and X-Men Legends rule, and they really, they did really appreciate hearing how much I loved the Legends games and the Ultimate Alliance games that came after that. As I recall them mentioning, they really did want to do that Logan game, the Wolverine Origins game, but they also were sad that they couldn't do Ultimate Alliance too and they had to give it to a different developer because they felt so attached to the series. And like, Activision, their first, when they, it was a dark day for X-Men fans, but Activision got the right. to it from Capcom and it was

for the same reasons Activision got Spider-Man after the bankruptcy was finally over. Marvel was like, we have a new high-bitter Capcom and it's Activision. To go back to that real quick, Henry, that's what made me think Marvel would do anything for money

because I don't see them working with street fighter characters when they have, you know, more than negative income coming in. Well, they would definitely work more with an American company that One, they could, you know, actually have meetings with in a daily basis in the, you know, pre-ish internet world. And at top of that, Activision was in the position to outbid most other people back then, you know.

And but they, they had crappy X-Men games until these. And that's why, like, I was in the same camp as Gary when I first heard about the Legends game. I was like, oh, it's like Diablo. Because I enjoy Diablo. I was never super hardcore into it. But I did enjoy it. But here's like a top-down. three-quarter Diablo type game

that actually really gives his shit about X-Men in a way that even the Capcom games couldn't really do because there's no story I mean there is a story but not really very loose yeah having conversations getting to walk around the fucking mansion and be like hey here's the room for the day room

and here's the blackbird and here's everyone's bedrooms yes like everyone has their bedrooms are individually designed so you can see you know their personality shows through who gambit has a firm mattress Like the concept art is in Colossus' room on an easel. Yes.

And there's no reference to Coloss's painting, but I'm like, I know that. Klosses, that's the irony of his character. He's gentle, even though he's strong. I'm very smart. That stuff was incredible to me. And also, I felt like a very special smart boy because each of these games in the whole series has a trivia game that you get. Yes. Yes, for XP, yes. I love that so much, too.

Yeah. So it just felt like I was not only being spoken to, but rewarded. I know. It's a little bit of that millhouse. Like, people should get prizes for watching. I was getting a prize for watching. My characters were powerful because I could just dominate the trivia game as soon as it opened up. Absolutely.

I like that they didn't need to be slavish to the movies and adapt the movies. They could still do their own thing, even though it looks like they have the movie designs for the most part. So it's the ultimate X-Men designs, I think, which is the movie. Basically, they were making the movie designs and then they did. decided to, they did do a rebooted universe called the Ultimate Universe that was supposed to be more reader friendly but ended up getting as confusing

as the real world, the regular one. But so the ultimate guys looked kind of like the movie guys, but that was another thing I loved about Legends is that you unlocked costumes and they could be deeper and two did it even more like and the fan service of costumes. I was like,

finally Wolverine can have a mask on instead of this mask-free Wolverine from the Ultimates, you know. And there would be, so two X-Men Legends games, and then Raven would not do Marvel Ultimate Alliance One and Two, and then shockingly out of nowhere, and I know you played this, Henry, and I have to assume that Gary did as well. So there was one that came out in 2019 after 2009's Ultimate Alliance 2, Ultimate Alliance 3, developed by Team Ninja published by Nintendo?

Yep, yeah. Very, very strange. I, so, yeah, well, so Legends comes out, Legends ends with a teaser that like, oh, well, you beat Magneto in this one, but Apocalypse is coming. You fight Apocalypse in the next one. And then Raven developed Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which does, after the X-Men's ones were so successful, I can see why they said, well, why isn't just every Marvel character in this? And so then, yeah, Bicarious Visions did Mua 2. And then it just lied Fallow for a while. And I, this is just a guess. And I say this is a person who beat the Ultimate Alliance 3 and all of its

DLC is that I believe what happened is that Marvel made a deal for the Avengers game with Square NX and Nintendo learned that that would not be on their system and so Nintendo's like well

if you would license a Nintendo only Avengers game to us we will pay for like Nintendo published it and hired their pals at Team Ninja to do it because like well you guys did the you know all those Coi Tecmo Mooso games, you can make a game like that.

And so, and as somebody who beats the Avengers game, Ultimate Alliance 3 is way better than the Square Annex Avengers game. And I like that game, but Ultimate Alliance 3, I couldn't believe it happened, but it's great. Like it really, and it really is every character's in it, including all of the X-Men. And there's really just an X-Men stage of like, you're fighting Sentinels and Magneto around the school.

but that's kind of the thing I do miss about X-Men Legends is that it was so focused on one thing that every Mua game instead was like well we got to have the Wakanda level and then we got to have the Silver Surfer level and now we got to have the Dormammu level

Let's go to Asgard. Asgard too. You can't you can't really luxuriate in one universe of Marvel stuff because it has to be a Marvel game for every person who loves anything in marble which I mean I'd love the legends game that is about just the Fantastic Four or more X-Men but yeah did you ever play the

PS2 a Fantastic Four game that's kind of like yeah legend or the X-Men legends game it's not very good yeah but it's kind of like it but it's based on the movie yes yeah which hey I believe our pal Nick Weiger actually worked on that in his previous life oh right it could be like a game tester yeah yeah yeah sadly these uh these X-Men legends games are not available on any modern platform. There's ever been an HD remake or anything like that,

but they were released for everything. So it's easy enough to find it, even PC. I'm sure there's an ISO floating around out there if you want to look for that. There's a PC port of the second one

and there's actually a huge modding community that mods characters into it. That's great. Characters from the first game and then basically any Marvel character you can think of, they've made a skin

and a power set for. So if you play the PC version of this, you can do a lot of cool stuff. That's really... It's really too bad. The Legends never got a real thing. I believe, again, this is my guess. I would think part of the backroom deal that Nintendo gets the right to the Ultimate Alliance name was that Activision got the right

to resell the old Ultimate Alliance games on digital storefront. So for Xbox and PS4, you can play Ultimate Alliance 1 and 2. But sadly, Legends wasn't included in that. It was really, it was really too bad. It's, but yeah, pretty much, it seems like the Activision games only get to come back when, like, Marvel doesn't want to make deals with Activision to make new games, but they will let them re-release an old game if Activision does a favor for them back. I think that's pretty much how it ends up. But yeah, I still, I can't get over that the series continued with Team Ninja and Nintendo. Like, it's one of the craziest, craziest things. Yeah, I did a double take there seeing the developer and the publisher. Like, oh, I guess, well, it turns out. Actually, Gary, did you play that, Ultimate Alliance 3? Did you check that out? I did. Okay.

I checked it out. I stalled out about parway through it. But I like it. It's on my list to go back to. I just got distracted by work games. Me and my husband and I had a great two-player time with it. It was really great. But the worst thing I'll say about it,

if you love those old legend games, trust Henry when he says, it plays a lot like those, and I think you'll like it. but I also I finished it by playing the Fantastic 4 DLC which I thought was made for me and it had one of the highest difficulty spikes

out of nowhere and the game is not particularly difficult but it has some real bullshit in it in that Fantastic 4 DLC that I was like I even though I bought this for the explicit reason of finally playing as a Fantastic 4 in this game I kind of want to quit because there is a real giant difficulty spike

just in that DLC so that we're reaching the end of our podcast and again we chose the most notable x-men games to talk about and i know there are probably some ones that you wanted to hear about just you know list them in the comments if there's anything we forgot but one thing i noticed upon my research is that uh there was not an x-men pinball game until 2012 as far as i could tell because i was just thinking in my head did i have i ever seen an x-men pinball game you know in the 90s or in the 2000s and the answer was no so maybe i missed something but it seems like there wasn't an ex-men pinball

game you i figured there be at least two from that era i don't i don't know what happened there But if I'm missing something, let me know. But any final thoughts? I wonder if there's somebody listening to this who's, like, pounding their steering wheel that we're not talking about the game gear, X-Men games or something. Like, the stuff we didn't cover on this is all pretty weird small ball outside of some Wolverine solo games that are interesting. But as Henry said, are like a different subject. Yeah.

The Wolvie solo games are kind of their own thing. Or it's same with like X-Men crossover games with other. Or as part of the larger Marvel world. Or it's like also maybe there's some dumb person out there who liked the Mutant Academy. games, but those sucked, and I don't want to talk about them. Also, when it comes to X-Men games... I love it when they fought the Imperfects. I'm an imperfect, Stan.

Head to toe. Like, looking at this list of games, there is more than I thought there would be, but also less than I thought there would be. So, it's a weird, like, it was easy to choose just, like, six or seven to talk about, but then I was like, oh, it feels like there should be a lot more of these. You know, I think

to since then, in the last decade, I think the game companies have learned a little bit that the X-Men are really worth it because even though since the debut of Iron Man in 2008, the Avengers are the A-team. The X-Men in the 90s, way more important than the Avengers. It's a total reversal now. But Marvel versus Capcom 3, that had the X-Men characters, people expected it. And for ultimate Marvelous to Capcom 3, the X-Men characters start getting de-emphasized a bit. They're not as much on the cover. Most of the new characters are not X-Men. And then

They do Marvel versus Capcom infinite with no X-Men. And that game had some problems. I think it was too, it was hated more than it deserved. But a huge mistake they made was trying to do it with no X-Men. They're like, we don't need X-Men. Like X-Men is where that series started and people were very disappointed. There weren't X-Men in it. That's very strange, yeah.

I think if you see in Ultimate Alliance 3, that's got some X-Men. And I think they learned their lesson since then that, like, if you're going to do every Marvel character kind of game that's not focused on you know Avengers or Spider-Man or whatever then you got to have some X-Man in there you can't you will lose money if you don't fully if you don't represent some mutants in there and where is this property now

are they making new movies it feels like they've been sort of gone from my life or like just kind of absent from pop culture for a while well so there I want to say that that that foraxis Midnight Sun game that is coming out. I feel like I manifested into existence. Oh, God, I can't wait for that. You know, as a, as a video game podcaster,

like people ask, you know, what's your dream game? Like, pitch your best property. And I always said X-Men tactics. Like, I always wanted X-com, but with X-Men. Yeah. And then they're kind of making it, but I have to have some ghost rider in there as well. Yeah, you know, it's, it's going to be some morbious. Yeah, you've got, you've got

Wolfie, you've got Magic, you've got Nico from the runnerways. So you got some mute rep in there. But yeah, it's like, But then, well, that game, why is Captain Marvel there? I mean, I know why Captain Marvel there because she's a very popular character and about to start a new movie. But she has nothing to do with magic. Like, she shouldn't be hanging out in the Doctor Strange stuff.

Yeah, I feel like there could have been a good Freedom Force version of X-Men because I don't really care that much about superheroes, but I really don't care about Silver Age one. So as much as I wanted to like Freedom Force, I would just, you know, the kitsy Silver Age stuff, I had no skin in the game, really. I love Freedom Force. That, I think it is, I think it's Levine's best game, honestly. Like, if I want to be super contrarian, I'll say it's his best game. Sorry, Gary, what you said? No, no, I just get those Freedom Force games are so difficult. They are really hard.

They are surprisingly really hard. And they're good. I love them. They also have a huge modding scene. Like, you can play Freedom Force as the X-Men if you want pretty easily. But I guess to set us in time in February of 2022, where are the X-Men at? Well, there hasn't been any new game. announced that is like focused on the x-men but uh like gary said about midnight sons x-men are

appearing more and more and stuff uh disney has the rights to them so they're being emphasized more on disney plus i believe this year is the x-men 97 show which is the continuation of the original x-men show from 92 so uh the the x-men are and every movie or thing they do in the to you, there are fans going like, is this when they first say mutants? Is this when we first hear about mutants? Like, it feels like it's about to happen any day now. I've heard some rumors about that Dr. Strange movie. Who knows if they'll just bring in like Hugh Jackman just shows up or whatever.

Just off the top of my head. I'm not spoiling. I don't know. I'm just saying. Well, you know what, Henry, I'm sorry. Because I lived through the past six years, I was just thinking of Trump. Like, every day you're hearing about the X-Men more and more. Gene Gray was very rude to me.

no class I apologize I'm really sorry for doing that but Gary thank you so much for joining us today thank you for this topic

it's a great topic and it could be revisited at some point I mean there's still other games we could talk about before we go though please let us know

where we can find you online about the duckfeed.tv family of podcasts and other stuff you're doing yeah I'm a podcastman on duckfeet.

A primary interest to retro listeners in general is probably our show watch out for fireballs to the Games Club podcast. A specific interest to fans of this podcast is Days of Futurecast,

which is started as an episode by episode podcast about the X-Men animated series. And then we moved on to, we cover some MCU stuff, but I've switched on to comic runs of the X-Men. We're just wrapping up the Avengers versus X-Men comic, which I had never read before and is a little disappointing, but it was still fun to talk about. And yeah, I think if you're a fan of the X-Men, you will dig that. And you can go to patreon.com slash ductfeed TV if you want to support us and get episodes early.

Otherwise, though, just check us out. I'd really appreciate it. And Henry, what about you? Well, listeners should know that me and Bob do several podcasts together as part of the Talking Simpsons Network. Every week we go through an episode of The Simpsons in Talking Simpsons chronologically. We are about to start up season 13 and season three when you're hearing this. And of course, we have our sister podcast. What a cartoon.

where once a month now we cover an animated series and deep in the back catalog. We've covered X-Men Evolution and X-Men the animated series. And also, Gary's been on a few episodes of those as well, including we talked about Spider-Man 1994, that animated series with Gary, for example. And, yeah, it's all... And you can find Talking Simpsons of What a Cartoon,

wherever you listen to podcasts as well. We have a ton of exclusive content because me and Bob are supported by listeners like you at patreon.com slash talking simpsons go there to find tons of exclusives like us covering Futurama King of the Hill, Mission Hill, the critic, Batman the animated series, and a different

animated feature film once a month. Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And as for this podcast, this has been Retronauts. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to support the show, please go to Patreon.com slash Retronaut. Sign up there for a lot of bonuses. Sign up for three bucks a month. You get all the episodes one week

at a time and at free. For five bucks a month, you get that, but also access to two full link bonus episodes every month of this podcast and a weekly podcast and article by Diamond Fight. And we started that new content in 2020. So that are now over 50 exclusive bonus episodes that you haven't heard if you're not a patron on the $5 level at patreon.com slash retronauts. And of course, I have been Bob Mackey. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Serbo. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again soon for another episode of Retronauts. Take care. You know,

Thank you.