Video Gaming Blog

Submitted by Gaming Briefs

Although I don’t think this was the first one-on-one fighting game based on licensed products - Dragonball Z from Banpresto certainly preceded it by almost a year - it certainly was one of the most prominent, and here’s some special recordings of the game right here:

And click here for a recording featuring all the character endings.

As a fighting game based on licensed products, it was one of the most successful, featuring some of the most colorful and well-designed graphics, and one of the most challenging things about it is how successful you can be in working the combo feature that figures prominently in the game. Akuma from the Street Fighter games even turns up as a secret character!

An interesting note: the Silver Samurai may have begun as a nemesis of Daredevil’s years before in the Marvel Universe, which does make his appearance here a little odd. Some of the voice performers for the cartoon series airing on Saturday morning at the time also provided their work for this game, such as Catherine Disher, who played the voice of Storm and Psylocke in the cartoon show. This was so successful that it led to the production of several more games based on the Marvel Universe, up until 2000, which I’ll try to add more about in time. The other one I certainly will provide here now is Marvel Super Heroes, produced the following year:

And click here for the endings to the characters.

It’s a good game, but I think they still made a little too easy a search for what characters to use: four players from Children of the Atom returned here (I think they could’ve left out Wolverine and put maybe Quasar or the Vision in his place if they’d thought deeper), two of whom were bosses and are certainly playable now, those being Juggernaut and Magneto. Of course, they’ve had some of their powers downplayed from the prior game. On the other hand, there’s a new feature here, the gemstones inspired by the Infinity Gauntlet storyline written in 1991. And there’s even a secret character here named Anita who may come from the Darkstalkers franchise, probably because Capcom thought putting Akuma in this game would be too obvious the second time around.

Best of all: the game is specially dedicated to Jack Kirby, who passed away a year before the game was released.

And the amazing feats of games like this wouldn’t stop there - there’d be more awesomeness around the bend when X-Men vs Street Fighter was released the following year, and which I’ll make an effort to add a post on later. Man, is this fun.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.