To Me, My Portable Gaming Consoles!

So I guess I'm not quite finished with Game Gear reminiscing yet. But I am going to hit three games in one swing, just because I don't think there'll be much to the post otherwise.

As you may recall - if you haven't blocked it out - the X-Men were quite big in the early '90s. They'd been big for awhile, but now there were lots of titles, a cartoon, and naturally, lots and lots of games. And, being the dutiful Marvel Zombie I was, I made sure to buy those games for my Game Gear. Three games to be exact (well, four if you count Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge, but I'd rather forget I probably wasted two months allowance on that game). X-Men, X-Men: Gamesmaster's Legacy, and X-Men: Mojo World. Sigh, I was such a twit back then. But at least I was a happy twit.

Every game was the same. You start out with two available X-Men, and must travel to different locations to fight bosses and free other X-Men, who can help you travel to still other worlds and rescue more X-Men, until you get to the final boss. Of course, if one of your X-Men got defeated, you couldn't rescue them again later, they were just done. You had the mutants' powers, sort of. I think Storm only had her lightning bolts, and she could fly. No rainstorms or hurricanes. And you couldn't use your mutant powers constantly, as you had a bar that measured how much mutant power you had left, so conservation was important. The problem was, even the standard cannon fodder could be pretty difficult to defeat with just your fists, so it was hard to not use your powers.

Of the three, I think Mojo World was probably the best, which makes sense as it was the last one released. I think by that point they'd realized that every game played the same, so there needed to be some sort of hook. In this case, Mojo makes you travel to locations from the past and future, and rescue X-Men from particular time frames. So you defeat magneto at an old Army base, and rescue Cyclops in his original Yellow and Blue outfit. Another level you go to the future and fight Fitzroy to rescue Bishop's sister (Shard? Was she only in the cartoon? Did she ever appear in the comics?) It's a little touch, but it helped, because it seemed like they were at least trying to make your experience a little different.

There was usually one boss battle that was tricky. In X-Men, it was Sebastian Shaw, because the battlefield was littered with traps, so you had to lure him into those traps, rather than attack him directly. In Gamesmaster's Legacy (and what ever happened to the Gamesmaster? Man, so many bad '90s memories being stirred up), Fabian Cortez presented a similar issue. He was actually more annoying than Shaw, because with Shaw I understood the need to lure him into the path of flamethrowers, I was just bad at it. With Cortez, I'm honestly not sure what I was supposed to do, but apparently it wasn't "attack with mutant powers".

I never actually beat any of the games. Reached Mojo once, lost, and that was the closest I came. That's pretty typical for me and my older games, not so much with the more recent ones (I still have lots of games I don't beat, they just don't comprise as large a percentage). I don't know whether that means I've gotten better or games have gotten easier. I think it's the latter.