The Uncanny X-Men (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of LJN’s 1989 licensed-based action game for the NES, The Uncanny X-Men. The Uncanny X-Men for the NES was the first console game to bear the X-Men license. It’s one that piqued my interest as a kid when it first came out, and I finally got the chance to play it when a friend of mine decided to give me his stack of NES cartridges after his parents bought him a Sega Genesis. There were some real classics there, like Solar Jetman and Werewolf, and then there was X-Men. I remember thinking that the title screen was cool, and I liked that you could choose from several of the superheroes to play as. I also remember turning it off after about twenty minutes, feeling lucky that I had never asked for the game as a Christmas or birthday gift. It’s a top-down action game that takes place over five maze-like stages. You can choose the order in which you’d like to tackle the first four stages as well as the characters you’ll bring for the mission. Cyclops, Iceman, and Storm fight with projectile attacks while Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Colossus rely on hand-to-hand tactics. Everyone also has a secondary move that can help them avoid enemy attacks. The goal of each stage is to beat the super villain, snatch a “ floppy disk, and escape before the time runs out. Some areas have multiple paths, and some will require that you find keys to unlock the doors in your way. After clearing the first four stages, you’ll have to solve a “puzzle“ to gain access to the the final area where Magneto has been hiding out. It all sounds like a perfectly reasonable formula for an action game, but unfortunately, The Uncanny X-Men is anything but reasonable. The graphics are exceptionally terrible. Every hero is a palette-swap of the same character sprite, the enemies are indistinct blobs, and the eye-gouging color schemes do an ace job at obscuring important details. The sound is just as bad. The terrible music is usually drowned out by the piercing screech of your weapons, but muting the game isn’t a viable option since you often can’t see which of the background tiles can hurt you. You have to rely on the audio cues to avoid taking damage. But as awful as the presentation is, the gameplay is X-Men’s worst failing. The collision detection isn’t reliable, enemies often spawn directly on top of you, you have to open the sub-screen to see your life gauge, and the game constantly speeds up and slows down as the NES struggles to keep up with shoddy programming routines. The AI partner is also completely useless and actively gets in your way. Even though they each represent one of your “lives,“ you’re better off assigning the close-range characters to the CPU-controlled player and letting them get killed at beginning of each stage. Finally, if you manage to clear the first four areas, you’re met with one of the worst progression-gating puzzles ever conceived of for a video game. The final stage can only be accessed by holding Select, B, and Up and pressing start at the menu, but how are you supposed to know this? The manual only vaguely references that there’s a trick to it, so... Well, you might have noticed that some of the enemies are a different color from the others. For instance, in an area filled with red knights, a blue one will occasionally pop up. If you kill thirty of these “special“ enemies, the text shown at the end of a stage will have a few words highlighted in red. You’re supposed to do this for all four areas and take note of what words are shown in red each time. If you put these all together in the right order, you’ll get a message: 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. Then, if you read the small print on the cartridge’s label, you’ll see a line that reads, “ B UP together with START“. The game seriously expects you to put up with it long enough to figure this all out. I never did. It was only after I read how to do it online years later that I ever managed to finish the game. It was one of those games that I only ever pulled out when I had finished my other, better games and wanted something different. I want to say that it’s not as bad as people say... I mean, I see some merit in it. Not much, granted, but more than, say, Home Alone, Athena, or Back to the Future Part 2 & 3, and I’d certainly take it over Adamantium Rage on the SNES. But, if you’re feeling brave and decide to give it a try, tread lightly and pray your temper can withstand some of the bull puckey the game throws at you. Or you could just set it on fire. That would be the best way of maximizing its potential for fun. _____________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete () punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!