X‑Men start the par­ty right with first Ver­sus entry

If you’re an old head video gamer like us here at Gam­ing Insur­rec­tion, you know that Cap­com and Mar­vel was THE pow­er­house cou­ple in video games dur­ing the 1990s. Start­ing in 1993 with The Pun­ish­er arcade game, Mar­vel and Cap­com estab­lished the foun­da­tion of the mod­ern com­ic book and ani­me fight­ing game scene. Dur­ing the ’90s I stum­bled across a game that helped build the path to Cap­com’s and Mar­vel’s glo­ry: X‑Men: Chil­dren of the Atom.

Based on the 1993 X‑Men Fatal Attrac­tions sto­ry­line, Mag­ne­to, with the help of the X‑Men’s most for­mi­da­ble foes, plans to launch an elec­tro­mag­net­ic pulse on the Earth, caus­ing dis­rup­tion to its mag­net­ic fields, leav­ing human­i­ty in a Dark Age. With Earth­’s future in the bal­ance, the X‑Men must bat­tle once more.

COTA’s graph­ics are crisp and clear thanks to Cap­com’s CPS‑2 board, which is revered in devel­op­ing fight­ing games for arcade cab­i­nets. I felt with the CPS‑2 board, it was easy for me to know which char­ac­ter I was using and who was the oppo­nent. The back­grounds had plen­ty of col­or that was bal­anced instead of placed hap­haz­ard­ly, and sprites were nice­ly drawn and beau­ti­ful to look at. The music is excel­lent, fit­ting in with the clas­sic Cap­com aes­thet­ic and cre­at­ing a nice vibe for fighting. 

My dis­likes of COTA are few but can be frus­trat­ing. Cap­com, while known for hav­ing inno­v­a­tive fight­ing game con­trols, need­ed to refine COTA’s con­trol scheme. It’s hard to get invest­ed as a new­com­er. The auto­mat­ic block­ing, while seen as help­ful, can be dan­ger­ous and unhelp­ful to new­com­ers also. And, the biggest mys­tery I had was why Cap­com was aggres­sive­ly push­ing a Street Fight­er char­ac­ter into a X‑Men game, forc­ing me to believe Aku­ma is an offi­cial part of X‑Men lore? Cap­com could have let Aku­ma sit this one out, even if he had just been in Super Street Fight­er II Tur­bo. There were more Street Fight­er games com­ing, obviously.

X‑Men: Chil­dren of the Atom has con­tributed to the estab­lished part­ner­ship between com­pa­nies with leg­endary prop­er­ties beloved the world over. While the future of Mar­vel and Cap­com is uncer­tain, it’s safe to say that from this union, fight­ing game and com­ic book fans ate well in these ’90s fight­ing streets.