Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Marvel Super Heroes Review

Marvel Super Heroes is a Street Fighter Alpha-style fighting game that features characters from the classic Marvel Comics lineup. Four characters (Psylocke, Wolverine, Juggernaut, and Magneto) return from Capcom's previous comic-based fighter, X-Men: Children of the Atom. New characters include Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, and more. It was an exciting arcade game, but the Saturn version falls a little flat by comparison.



The game differs from the pack via its inclusion of gems that litter the landscape. You can pick up the gems and use them on command, resulting in brief power-ups to the character's speed, power, life, etc. Other than that, it's just basic Street Fighter action, complete with fireballs, dragon punches, and the like. The arcade version was a great game and differed enough from the Street Fighter and X-Men games to be entertaining. The Saturn version has virtually the same gameplay.



Graphically, MSH looks all right. The characters and backgrounds are large and colorful. But the game also produces an awful lot of slowdown, even when using the Saturn's RAM cart, which adds in additional frames of animation via its increased storage capacity. Yes, you read that right, the Japanese RAM cart is compatible with the US version of MSH. The slowdown is even more apparent when picking larger characters such as Juggernaut and Blackheart. The music in MSH is fairly good, but the sound is really annoying: The speech is pretty garbled and the sound effects are very metallic sounding.



MSH Saturn is tolerable, but it lost the arcade game's soul in the translation. The constant loading and slowdown don't help much, either. While I found the arcade game a blast, this version just seemed dull and boring. Whether this can be attributed to the translation itself or the fact that several, mostly better, Capcom fighters have been released in arcades since Marvel, I don't know. Rent it first and see if it's your thing.

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