X-Men & X-Men 2: Clone Wars - Embrace the Clone

[StewShearerOld]

X-Men & X-Men 2: Clone Wars - Embrace the Clone

X-Men and X-Men 2: Clone Wars take Marvel's mutants and transform their world into a pair of Genesis sidescrolling adventures filled with all the comic content you could ever want. Whether or not they're actually good, of course, is a different question.


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[Dr.Awkward]

Hey, I remember these! Well, sorta, I think I only got as far as the first or second stage when I rented them. Clone Wars is definitely the better of the two becuase the first felt like a mess to my kid self.

Although I wouldn't say they're better, you should look into Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge and Wolverine: Adamantium Rage. The former is a bit eh if not an unusual take on the series, while the latter is rather linear in design but you get to tear up the environment (along with this terribly-explained timer that's sort of reverse-PTSD when it runs out?)

EDIT: Oh yeah, the beat-em-up arcade game! Definitely one of the best X-Men games out there. Just remember that it's even better with four players!

 

[shrekfan246]

I had both of these when I was a kid. Gotta agree that Clone Wars is by far the better title, even back then I preferred it. Though I was always a bit sad that they changed Nightcrawler's power so he couldn't teleport through the level walls anymore; It was a bit fun to cheat the geometry of the Shi'ar Empire stage once you got the hang of how his teleport controlled.

Playing as Magneto was probably one of the biggest reasons I dug Clone Wars, though. He was hard to use compared to some of the other characters, and a bit weak offensively when you weren't at full health, but damn fun all the same. Dat flight.

 

[lastjustice]

Yeah first X-men game was not very good. Even when I first played it was very unimpressed by it. Majority of the cast is delegated to simply support for 4 main cast, and for main cast are neutered to all feeling basically the same. The game just felt really flat as little stood out. It was highly positive in it's reviews, but I guess when compared to the unplayable mess that was the LJN Xmen on Nes(No one would ever played this game if it wasn't a tie in. It was so bad, and LJN made so many bad tie in games back then.), the genesis title was a masterpiece in terms of giving a more entertaining Xmen experience. I still found it missing the mark. (like comparing the first Streets of Rage to second, you saw good ideas, but it didn't quite reach hit the mark till second game which was awesome.)


Xmen 2 Clone was much more fun, and the characters all were very different to play as. Each had parts of the game where they were more useful than others.(like the second lvl against the sentinel core boss, Cyclops worked best, his running speed was the perfect tempo, as all the explosions would generally miss you if you just jogged thru the escape part. Beast wrecks Exodus in the boss fight.)

Only have a couple issues with the game. I had was the later lvls got be so huge, and had a lot of vertical elementals to them(especially one where it is filling wih toxic water/liquid and you have to outrun it.), basically forcing you to pick wolverine or Nightcrawler if you played with 2 players. Wolverine was the go to character due to his ability scale any surface, and he automatically healed over time, you could simply wait around and make sure you could survive the stage. The boss fights could been cooler, as most of them required doing something simply pounding on the boss' face to win. They were rather quirky, like Apocalypse I get the X-men technically couldn't do much to him(all too often games have the X-men punching out Juggernaut despite that would never work in the comics.), so they had you destroy the machine in the stage by blowing up explosive mines instead while running on a treadmill. (which you pick magneto and just float in the corner.)

All in all the second game still holds up as a solid sidescroller experience, even if you took the Xmen title off it. The first is kinda forgettable, if was named something else, and just starred some sentai characters made up for that game instead, no one probably recall by this point. Granted there's much worse Xmen games, (Xmen-Nes , Arcade's revenge-Snes/genesis, Wolverine: Adamantium rage Snes/Genesis)but that doesn't make it any better.

 

[Tanis]

So...I was looking for these on GOG and didn't see them.

Am I just sucking at the search, or did you get them from another source?

 

[MrBrightside919]

So...I was looking for these on GOG and didn't see them.

Am I just sucking at the search, or did you get them from another source?

Both games are only on the Sega Genesis...

 

[Snotnarok]

I'm not sure why the first game got so much praise, I played it when it was new and I was not happy wit hit, even today it's just ...wayyy too clunky to enjoy.
The second game is far better, and good if that doesn't come across, it's a fun time that challenges you and has a variety of characters to use with different perks and abilities. From regenerating health, to double jump to the eye lazooooorz.

 

[StewShearerOld]

So...I was looking for these on GOG and didn't see them.

Am I just sucking at the search, or did you get them from another source?

I'm going to be doing a console review every month going forward. Apologies if there was any confusion. I'll try to make it more clear going forward.

 

[bdcjacko]

I still have both those games and my Sega. I will say this, x-men 1, the mojo level, that is bullshit.

Also as a kid I knew Wolverine having his claws own wasn't really using any more energy that pulling them back in. So it never made sense why that was on an energy bar. And why be anyone one but Wolverine (I mean accept for the level were Nightcrawler teleported through the walls and was done in a second).

 

[Objectable]

Must... resist.. tasteless Star Wars oke.

 

[Bbleds]

When I was growing up I envied genesis owners for their superior x-men titles since I went with the Snes as my choice for 1990's console. My sad story began by being blown away by the x-men arcade brawler game and later finding spider man/x-men arcades revenge at the local video store which my 8 year old ADD riddled mind thought was a tweaked port of the arcade game. After I called my friends over we were treated to the horrors of one of the worst games on Snes (and Genesis too) as well as a terrible video game adaptation of the x-men characters.

Pretty sure my friends and I made a blood oath to hunt down the creators of this game, and a small part of me still kind of wants to see it through. Anyhoos...for anyone looking for some old school x-men titles I know the arcade game (not the terrible console game with the child confusing title) was ported to Xbox live and I think PSN. Still one of my personal favorites, though it has some odd quirks (for example the sentinels are inexplicably the size of the normal characters). Also don't expect it to have a lasting appeal since it's originally an arcade game so your play through might last an hour tops. But I'd still recommend it overall and the port does have some nifty features thrown in to extend play value a bit, most notably being able to play the original Japanese version which has a few different features compared to the American release.

 

[BoomingEchoes]

I actually remember when I heard X-Men was coming out and hearing it would only be on the Genesis and being so grumpy about it. I was 10 and I was lucky to have both systems at that time. My cousin gave me his Genesis and all his games for nothing (and I still don't know why) but I still liked my SNES way better. But.. but.. but.. X-MEN!!!

X-Men are my favorite team too, so much so that if Marvel broke the team and all it's books (and I mean ALL -there were so many of them in the 90s) off of their company in the 90s and made it it's own entity, I likely wouldn't have gone back to Marvel for anything other then Spider-Man; That's how much in love with them I was.

When the game came out I remember hearing my parents were going shopping across town at Woolworth (it was one of the last still open at the time) and somehow I knew the store was carrying the game, in a day where it was VERY hit or miss for certain games to be carried by retailers (I remember how impossible it was to find Mario 3 in our town). I had the money left over from a holiday and decided (like there was ever a choice in my 10 year old brain) to go with them to get it.

Man, that box art was something else, nothing like you'd see in the comics of that time; it was about 10 clicks above the best cover art at the time. I'd be surprised if that box art alone didn't sell a bunch of copies of this game. And I still have the packed in poster for the game somewhere -I always wanted to put it up, but I was a weird kid who knew there was some sort of value in these things, so I wanted to frame it, and we never got a frame for it.

But the game itself.. Heaven and Hell all rolled into one. For one thing, I thought it was a beautiful game at the time --but that was at the time, we didn't really have much better at that point, and Genesis graphics were always slightly above most of what games for the Nintendo were. Later the SNES would see X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse, which will probably be my 3rd or 4th most played game for that system after Earthbound, Super Mario RPG and swapping places Power Rangers (don't ask me why Power Rangers -it was a pretty great beat'em up at the time), and I felt like that game ended up being the nicest looking X-Men of that period. But I didn't see a problem with the choice of X-Men we were given on the Genesis version, and I loved the team members who would pop in to help. The environments were interesting considering I knew where we were put, and would geek out to see The Savage Land and all that -it didn't really matter how they looked at the time, it was a privilege to be there regardless.

The gameplay though.. Holy hell was that the worst.. It was a Genesis game, so even then I knew from playing stuff like Altered Beast or Shinobi that there was a certain expectation of skill when a game came out for a Sega system. So it was easy to assume that the game would be hard. But this was HARD. Like the review states, every player character has a 1 inch punch, even Gambit who actually had a weapon in the form of his staff, while pretty much every enemy has unlimited ranged capabilities. It's just painful when all you can do with a staff is slap dudes in the shins.

The other thing, like the review states, is the extremely limited use of their powers. I get why they did this, they figured if there was unlimited use of things like Kinetically charged cards, optic beams or healing factors would make you godly in a game that wants to be as close to an arcade game as it could get --which, because there was no saved states, meant needing to restart the game from scratch if you happened to die.

Those two factors meant I never got very far, and meant that when I heard Clone Wars was coming out I made the mistake (a very very rare mistake for me -I was a completionist even then, even if I didn't enjoy the prior game)to decide to pass on the game based on the experience I had with the first (and, frankly, the box art wasn't as nice... WE DIDN'T HAVE THE INTERNET YET, OKAY!? lol). Hearing it was a much better game hurts me in the heart parts, even today.

 

[shiajun]

I never finished the first X-men game because of that whole reset thing. Neither my brother or I ever thought that we had to do something like that, so we always got to beating Mojo and then....wandered around the area trying to see if we had missed something. Plus, getting to that stage was in itself hard for our inexperienced hands. I don't think we ever tried playing the Excalibur level the "right" way. We always cheated with Nightcrawler to get to the elevator and be done with it.

I never knew there was another game. After that fiasco with the first X-men game I was put off until I came upon X-men Legends 1 and 2. Loved those games. It was heavy on the RPG elements, though many were quite useless (debuff powers come to mind, just a waste of energy). It was long and satisfying. I recommend those to any fan.

 

[XavierPrice]

X-men and X-Men 2 for the Genesis hold dear places in my heart, the first one especially as it was one of the first games I not only got, but BEAT for the system back in my childhood. 9 year old me loves it, and the music still brings back memories of beating up bad guys (In fact, I have the OST playing in the background right now). It was one of the games that defined my early days as a gamer, like Sonic 2, Street Fighter 2, Streets of Rage 3, and Earthworm Jim. (Yeah, I was on the Genesis side of that war. Don't worry, I grew up and learned.)

That said, everything this article says is... spot on. I've gone back to play those old games. I always used a Game Genie code for infinite powers because lacking was boring and dumb. Punching people was too weak, and a BAD idea against most bosses (Unless you're Wolverine). The powers as well seemed... odd. The charge up optical blast was okay, but took too long to charge, Gambit's 'orbiting' cards were really odd, and Nightcraller's teleport was... pretty much useless, and Wolverine... yeah, his was good, except limited to melee (not much choice there), though he did have an odd 'berserk' attack if you held attack and mutant power. And I want to know why his claws are limited. They're not the mutant power! Though he does heal if you let him stand there, which was kind of cool... if slow and boring.

And then there's Clone Wars, years before Hayden Christensen's 'performance' (Someone had to make a Star Wars reference!). That game was always awesome, if a little difficult. Each mutant had their own skill set, and even interacted with the levels. Beast and Psylock could stick to walls, and Nightcrawler and Wolverine could actually walk along walls and ceilings! The powers were great. Beast was strong and fast for his size, Wolverine was quick and tore through enemies, Cyclops had eyebeams that could wreck stuff in front of him... sometimes, Magneto could... be Magneto (Float OP must nerf), and Nightcrawler... still had useless teleport, but at least now there were level walls he could 'bamf' through for shortcuts.

I would have loved to see a third one in this style that included an even wider range of playable characters. A modern platformer with a vast array of mutants to play as would be... hard to balance. A solid effort could still probably put something great out. Closest I get is the X-Men Legends and Avenger's Ultimate Alliance games, which are fun in their own right, but not quite the same.

 

[Sylocat]

Ah yes, I remember renting this game, and later borrowing it from a friend.

I never encountered the reset thing because I never got that far to begin with. I was always looking to use my Game Genie, and would just give myself a level-select to the last level.

Incidentally, does anyone know if there are any Genesis emulators that can do soft resets?

 

[COMaestro]

I have one objection to this article regarding the first X-Men game. All the characters did NOT feel the same. Gambit was somehow an inch taller than everyone else and couldn't duck under projectiles the way the other characters could. Otherwise, spot on!