 |
Marvel Super Heroes Developer: Capcom Based on: Beating Captain America to death years before Marvel's Civil War made it popular. |
Games | Arcade | Marvel Super Heroes
Article by Kolbe | November 07, 2007
Fact: Street Fighter II? changed the fighting genre forever. During most of the '90s, practically every developer on the planet had a go at copying Capcom's arcade hit. Be it Midway with Mortal Kombat? or SNK with Fatal Fury?, SF clones were everywhere. A few even had enough charisma to catch on, and with the increasing competition Capcom soon realized that maybe, just maybe it would be a good idea to stop upgrading Street Fighter II and make a true sequel. Perhaps, dare they think it, make some new titles!
The "true sequel" thing didn't happen until 1998 with the release of Street Fighter III, but in the interim Capcom produced plenty of both Street Figther prequels and new games. One of these latter was the comical and creative Darkstalkers?; the other was based on Marvel's most successful comic property at the time: the X-Men.
The first of these, X-Men: Children of the Atom?, was an experiment at best. It served mostly to showcase the true strengths of Capcom's 2D powerhouse arcade board, the CPSII with insanely big multi-level stages and dozens of complex animations and visual effects. Of course, showing off crazy superhero powers requires crazy gameplay, which Children had in spades. Yet ultimately it played like an ultra-wacky version of Darkstalkers', loaded with chain combos and powered-up specials, and didn't really develop its own distinct identity until its sequel, Marvel Super Heroes, arrived a year later.
The game is loosely based on 1991's "Infinity Gauntlet" storyline in which Thanos the Titan tries to win the affection of his beloved Death by killing off half of the universe using the gauntlet and its six Infinity Gems. Right. It's important to note that "loosely" here means "has almost no relation whatsoever," but that's okay since we're talking about a fighting game here, not an adventure or action game. Ever seen a good or even vaguely coherent story in a fight game? Of course not. So basically the "plot" is more like a "premise," or rather "an excuse to beat the crap out of everyone."
The story is a load of crap, but Marvel Super Heroes fares much better in other areas, most notably in its artistic direction. The term "licensed game" is nightmare fodder, but Capcom had long demonstrated an ability to make licensed titles both deep and fun for gamers while still remaining faithful enough to the source material to satisfy the property's original fans. In this case, Capcom's artists really did their homework by designing the character sprites with impressively faithful likenesses of Marvel's most popular contemporary artists' renditions of the characters while animating them with as much detail as a Ryu or Morrigan. In fact, this level of animation was actually reduced when these sprites were ported to the Vs. games that followed in the footsteps of the Marvel titles.
First a Conan foe, then headache to Dr. Strange, Shuma-Gorath is one
of the most obscure Marvel characters. Capcom certainly read some old comics.
Every special move, snippet of dialogue, winning pose and voice actor truly evoked its comic book counterpart's personality. Captain America's over-the-top patriotism, Magento's threating presence and Juggernaut's ginormous evilness were all accounted for. Those who were reading Marvel comics at the time had plenty to love (something that wasn't strictly true of the sequels, unfortunately). Marvel Super Heroes is also a very colorful game, honoring the palette of classic comics without falling into annoying parody. Newer readers might find themselves confused, of course, given the way modern Marvel is all about grim atmosphere and darkened, boring colors.
Here we can see how Capcom used Mark Bagley's Spider-Man to create his sprite. With Romita colors!
The game's stages? Awesome. Though not as detailed or convoluted as those in Children of the Atom, they served their purpose quite well. They were occasionally interactive, too, depending on the character -- similar to Vega's wire mesh fence in SFII. Some were detailed enough that you'd be happy simply to just stare at them for a while, like Shuma-Gorath's unwalled loop stage or Doctor Doom's emerging submarine.
But visuals weren't the only good thing about Marvel Super Heroes. Gameplay was fun too, a vast improvement over Children of the Atom. Here we had a classic Street Fighter II clone, but one carrying traces of both its obvious inspiration and Darkstalkers. The standard three punches and three kicks, special techniques and super ("Infinity") moves were joined by air combos. Executing a successful air combo allowed players to perform over-the-top anime-inspired action. Most characters had chain combo patterns which made them easier to use. Unfortunately, the boundless creative abilities (and ridiculous amount of free time) of gamers resulted in game-breaking "infinite combos"... but hey. This is, after all, all about the Infinity Gems, right?
As for the Gems, they introduced some nice features to the gameplay. As in the original comic arc six Infinity Gems were present, each with unique attributes: Power, Time, Soul, Space, Reality and Mind. Each could be used only once per battle and could help even the odds or create an escape route in a difficult situation. Also, the Gems could raise a character's attributes in different fashion (varying according to each character), making for lots of possibilities with each character and encounter. Gems could be acquired from an opponent by effectively executing a Special or Infinity move (except with Thanos, who only dropped gems when hit by one of the latter).
Marvel Super Heroes was poorly ported to PlayStation and somewhat less poorly to Sega Saturn two years later. These home versions were significantly slower than the arcade game and suffered from reduced animation. Still, these are the only legal versions available for domestic use, and considering Marvel characters aren't a Capcom property, we're unlikely to see this game in a compilation or as a download in the near future. Or ever. Which is a shame, because this was the last Capcom's Marvel game truly about Marvel. Sure, all those Jill Valentine vs. Sabertooth and Mega Man vs. Doctor Doom matches were fun, alright, but not really much for building a little thing we like to call "coherence".