Back in the darkest depths of 1996, Capcom churned out what has to be one of my favorite games for Sega’s ill fated ‘Saturn’ games console, ‘X-Men: Children of the Atom‘. The game was in the most part, was just a re-skinned version ‘Street Fighter 2 Turbo’ that had come out not too long before. Unlike the later ‘Marvel vs Capcom‘ games, this game contained only characters from the X-Men comics, like Wolverine, Omega Red, Iceman and Psylocke, Akuma was also included as a secret character you could unlock with a code at the character select screen. The feature that really grabbed me at the time though, was that Capcom secured all of the voice actors from the excellent ‘X-Men Animated Series‘ to voice their characters in the game, one of the first occurrences of real TV actors working on a video game that I know of.

I am sure the mechanics of this game do not need explaining to most people, as it really is just SF2, but this was the first game (along with SF2T) that Capcom made that embraced such features as the ‘Tech Hit’, for when a throw or grab is countered and the double height super jump. The game featured 10 playable characters plus Akuma, and had 2 bosses, Juggernaut, the first boss you fight, and Magneto. Juggernaut isn’t too difficult to dispatch, but he can take any character down in 3 hits and cannot be tripped up, but Magneto, well that’s a different story… Anybody familiar with the final boss in Dead or Alive 4, Alpha-152, will already appreciate how much of a cheating mo-fo he is. His usual tactic is to fly into the very top right hand corner of the screen, which thanks to the super jump is twice the height of the bit you can see, and then activate his magnetic shield and keep bombarding you with ranged attacks while you struggle to hit him.

Because of the rage bought on by losing to Magneto constantly, I only ever completed this game with Omega Red and Cyclops, as the both have moves that could take Magneto down out of the sky even when he had his shield active, but this was still easily the 2nd best game on the Saturn, after Virtua Cop. The game eventually made its way to the PC in 1997 and the PS1 in 1998, but it is the Saturn version that holds a place in my heart. It was the success of this game, and the sequel (of sorts) ‘Marvel Super Heroes’, that later inspired what I believe to be the pinnacle of Capcom’s 2d fighter era, the ‘Marvel vs Capcom ‘series. For anybody looking fr a great 2d fighter that isn’t SF, I strongly suggest you check this out, it’s still as great today as it was 12 years ago.

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