Brand names don't mean as much to some people as they probably should. You see companies getting the names to all kinds of properties and just a few products later, you wish they'd never touched them. This was especially true with LJN. If you are a gaming and internet fan, you've probably heard of the infamous LJN company that used to make toys and video games back in the 80's and 90's. Well, they didn't tend to care who they outsourced their video games to, even when they had some of the biggest market names in the industry of the time. Names like Jaws and Back to the Future actually meant something when they were in movie form. When they were in NES form... not so much.
True to form, X-men should have been a no-brainer of a video game. There were a million different ways to make this game and they seemingly picked the worst one. When you look at X-men, you shouldn't be thinking, "This would make a killer top-down co-op game where the levels are absolutely garbage!" I don't know how else to reason this game out. It's absolutely nonsensical how they made these levels and how they thought up this horrific gameplay!
The characters themselves are just a hair away from being absolutely unrecognizable. The graphics along with the point of view make the game look like it was directly converted from the earliest Atari console. the worst part about it is the A.I. If you don't have a second player, the computer who is trying to help you goes anywhere they want and does whatever they want, no matter if it holds up your gameplay or not. Always get Cyclops and always make the computer a character who does not have range attack, like Wolverine.
Think about the animated series, or even the comic books at the time. Think about how much we loved Wolverine or Colossus and how cool it would be to play them in a video game for yourself. Well, we were pretty okay with a downgrade in graphics at the time. 8-bits didn't get you much in the ways of keeping with a movie or good looking animated TV show. This, however, could have at least been a side-scroller or something that even felt like it was trying to be part of the X-men. Seriously, this is closer to feeling like a parody of a Lego X-men game.
Even going by those standards, this game is awful. We could imagine being Link and fighting Ganon in the NES version, along with a myriad of other games. This, however, failed to capture any imaginations. The worst part about it is that it wasted such immense potential that other games captured far better and more naturally. The X-men, though having a rocky start, finally broke its bonds of just being a successful comic book series and has found a lot more success (and failures) in later projects. We've taken a look at a bunch of them, but we'll be taking a look at some more, so long as you don't side with the Brotherhood! Virtua Blast!
