#thebuttkingpost

the fuck!?

This is kind of a tough one!  Like, there’s a bunch of absolutely lousy games I grew up with but I love them out of sheer nostalgia.  The first X-Men game on the Genesis is a good example.  It’s not…unplayable or anything, but it’s obscenely difficult in the worst way.  It’s very difficult to explain why unless you’re somewhat familiar with the game (and not even going straight to the one major infamous puzzle that’s gone down in history as being one of the most obtuse puzzles in any video game ever*)

Like, it’s not bad from a programming perspective…it certainly functions to the developers’ intent but a lot of the way the game works seem cryptic to a very deliberate level.

Like, okay, there’s a high jump in the game, right.  You absolutely need to use this high jump to get past certain points in later levels.  How do you think a mechanic like this works in a platformer?  Holding the jump button down?  No.  Holding up and pressing jump?  No.  Pressing the jump button twice to do a double jump?  Some characters have that, but still no.  Basically, there’s a several frame delay between you pressing jump and the jump actually happening.  You need to press jump once and then IMMEDIATELY before the jump occurs press jump once again and hold it.  The manual is really vague about how it works and just kind of mentions to tap the C button rapidly.  Like every little minute detail about the game just begs the question of why things are the way they are.

Boss fights aren’t regular boss fights.  They’re extremely cryptic trial and error puzzles in which all bosses are completely invulnerable until a very small window of opportunity occurs in which they can take damage.  There’s generally no way to tell when this window occurs and as a kid I just went about it randomly and hoped a hit would occur.  It wasn’t until I emulated the game with savestates that I was able to keep reloading states during boss fights to finally figure out the explicit moment a boss is vulnerable to attacks, and this time frame generally doesn’t last for more than half a second at a time.  For example, the very first boss you fight is Juggernaut.  Generally all he does is charge from side to side (Unless your health is too low and then he’ll just kill himself.  Yeah, that’s a thing) and normally you’d think in a game where bosses are invulnerable until a window this would be when he stops charging before he starts again, but it doesn’t work that way.  The only moment you can hit him is the exact moment he starts charging at you, which in most cases wouldn’t be a usual moment a player would try to attack an enemy since they’d be too focused on avoiding him.  Special attacks such as projectiles (i.e. Cyclops’ beam and Gambit’s cards) are worthless against bosses too.  They literally do no damage, even in the small window where the bosses can be hit.

*And, of course, while I’m already this deep into the game’s weird cryptic shit, why not talk about what I think is the most obtuse puzzle in any video game ever.  This one is infamous enough that it’s fairly well known even to people who haven’t played the game but I don’t see it talked about too often (I think this might have been on an Angry Video Game Nerd episode but I honestly can’t remember) but if you’re unaware it’s pretty wild.  In one of the last levels of the game you’re told by Professor X before the level starts that "You must disable and then completely reset the computer that controls the danger room.“.  Once you beat the boss at the end a little hologram looking thing of the danger room appears and you can hit it and it’ll blow up.  Then you have to find out how to ‘reset the computer that controls the danger room’

And that computer happens to be your Genesis.  Your Genesis’ reset button.  That one line of dialogue before the level starts is your only clue as far as this puzzle goes.  And of course, this level is the only one in the entire game with a time limit.  The only reason I knew about this as a kid was because I had a fairly thick paperback book for the Genesis that had little mini walkthroughs and cheats for most games and this was one of the major quips about X-Men.  I can’t imagine figuring this out without any prior knowledge and to this day I cannot think of a game with an even remotely similar puzzle in it.  It’s like something you’d see in Eternal Darkness or something and I honestly have to give the developers credit for taking advantage of the system’s soft-reset feature in such a unique way.

Anyway, there’s a lot more weirdness going on with the game, but that just kind of gives you an idea of how I feel about it.  It’s absolutely a bad game, yes, but I grew up with it, I stuck with it, I beat it, I know the game fairly well now, and I love it just because of how fucking out there it is.  It’s one of those games I imagine would make for an interesting Let’s Play from somebody who knows what they’re doing but at the same time the only people who’d find that interesting are idiots like me who already know about all the dumb game’s tricks.

For the record, the sequel X-Men 2: Clone Wars, is a lot – a LOT – more straightforward.  It’s a really solid game, but I only rented it as a kid as opposed to the original which both my cousin and I owned, so I have a lot more personal attachment to the first than the second which is absolutely the better game.

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