I’m not sure who Arcade is, but he must be a villian in the Marvel comic universe.  This time, he has captured the X-Men in a truck, that has a vacuum attached to the end of a tube.  You heard me right, a vacuum attached to the end of a tube.  How the X-Men would get stuck in this kind of situation, I’m not sure.  Has to be marketing, has to be.

Right.

Spiderman is busy swinging form rooftop to rooftop when he sees all of this unfold.  It’s up to him to save the day.  I had some complaints from the get go.  The game has a… rather childish concept for a game, but takes itself very seriously.  Spiderman can shoot webs, but not in any direction, just straight.  Ironically, he can sling web ropes from ledges and stuff.  However, he fires it up diagnally and nowhere else.  Spiderman runs weird.  His spidersense is in the game.  It appears as an icon in the far right, lots of lines and telekinetic powers eminating from the icon, and an arrow, yes an arrow that points to where the threat is offscrean.  Spiderman looks like he has a rope attached to a belt attached to him, he runs as if he’s held in place by some unforseen force.  Now, what I did like, and what was very unique to this game, is Spiderman can stick to walls.  He only needs to jump on one to stick to it.  Very few games actually have characters stick to walls, Sonic the Hedgehog and (Cyberblade?) come to mind.

This game is too open in some areas, and in the rest it is too cluttered.  Later levels have Spiderman moving around in dungeons, yes dungeons.  Most of the screen is drawn with steel and the building layout (this is a platformer), with little room to move around in.

I’m pretty certain based on the title and characters shown, that this game features the X-Men as playable characters in later levels.

While this game is a good concept and had a lot of promise, it bombs out by the lack of refinement.  It could have also had a lot more polish.  They made the mistake of creating it on the Genesis first, as weak developers (it shows), and porting it to the SNES.  It almost looks like they decided to stretch the screen in the SNES version.

Oh well.

Yozuki’s Drive - 4