Marvel Super Heroes (Arcade, 1995)

 

The second game in the MVC series steps things up. The first had the X-Men, while this has lots of Marvel characters in general. There's no Capcom yet, that would start with the third one. Of the ones I've played (at press time, half of the eight games in question), this is actually my favorite. More on why that is la...

...the hell is that purple thing?

The roster isn't as big as I expected considering this has the wider Marvel-verse. Returning characters include Wolverine and Psylocke, good choices. Now Magneto and Juggernaut, the bosses of the previous game, are playable. Apparently Capcom did market research on the previous game (it was easy to pull up the records on arcade machines) and found that these four were the most popular characters by a considerable margin.

Plus, we're debuting Hulk, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, Blackheart (who?) and... Shuma-Gorath. Who?

This roster is kinda limited. No Thor? No Black Panther? No Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch? I'll even take a Hawkeye.

Seriously, what the hell is that? Some kind of Cthulhu monster?

I go with Captain America as lead first. Going to try a few characters. No more Psylocke, I'm cutting myself off from that tall drink.

I have no idea who Blackheart is, but he does look bad-ass and his stage theme has a great, Mortal Kombat II esque theme. Link in a few here.

The combat is pretty much the same as the first game, at least to this layman. Cap has a dash-strike with the shield. Being able to play as the Avengers makes this significantly more interesting to me than the previous game.

Cap shows off his behind-the-back shield throw, while Blackheart summons a bunch of green ghosts to presumably DRAG YOU TO HELL.

Two of the more wholesome superheroes duke it out! This is just a friendly spar.

Spider-Man can fling webs to freeze his opponent...for like half a second, so this isn't like Sub-Zero's freeze.

Cap's shield-swings leave a bunch of afterimages which looks awesome. Another cool aspect of playing as him is that when he throws his shield away in any way, you have to pick it back up to keep using it.

Next, I battle my previous main, noted X-Woman Psylocke, of Psylocke: Child of Atom fame.

She dishes out the devastating ROLLING SIT-ON-FACE manuever. In this game it's more of an ankle-headscissors rather than a straight-up face-sit, however.

The best new character in this game is probably Hulk, who is insanely fun to play as and I'll probably be doing a lot of that as this series goes on.

Hulk's punches are huge, devastating swings. He's like Zangief on gamma rays. He hits the hardest out of all the characters, at the cost of a bit of speed.

Just because Cap doesn't jump kick in the movies...doesn't mean he can't.

Cap has no trouble throwing Hulk! All of the characters can throw Hulk. IMO, Hulk should be throw-immune. Mistakes were made.

Cap wins this round, but Hulk will be back. Looking forward to playing as him.

Cap goes on to face a new nightmare: Whatever the hell Shuma-Gorath is. The monster from the movie Life? Is that CALVIN?

The battle is joined, and...cut to black.

Cap was never seen again.

I give it a try with Psylocke...nope. The horrors that followed are too brutal to even show on this blog. Shuma-Gorath's GRAVEYARD OF BONES has a new addition, the bones of Psylocke.

Nothing can stop Shuma-Gorath. Nothing. He's like the Cloverfield Monster and John Carpenter's The Thing rolled into one. Cthulhu himself looks at this guy and nopes out. What is he? I dunno. What's he from? I dunno.

WHOA WHOA, Psylocke! Don't be peddling your Klan talk around here missy!

Juggernaut is no longer the Goro of the game, relegated to just another regular fighter.

Spider-Man really lets him have it. He'll always be Magneto's Nappa! It's very difficult to emerge from that bodyguard shadow. Not everyone can be a Diesel or a Batista.

Iron Man has some slick moves, like this double-orb hadoken.

He can also fire missiles. Spider-Man has a great web-shield block. I like everything about this game, and as a kid I would have been hugely into this. Probably would have started following Marvel at all 15 years sooner.

This is a good time to mention that you can acquire Infinity Stones over the course of the fights, and these give you activatable super-moves that have various functions. For example, the Power stone boosts your damage output temporarily. This was a cool idea, and sets the game apart from other fighters in 1995.

Wolverine is my next foe. Not to be confused with Star Wolf of Star Fox fame.

Soon it will be the 64th time! Though to be fair, remaking old stuff is probably saving the industry from heading towards a bubble-burst at this point. Actual new IPs that light people's world on fire and have longevity, like Elden Ring and Crimson Desert, are the occasional exception rather than the norm now, with existing great series like Assassin's Creed and Metroid Prime stumbling hard with their most recent entries.

Speaking of 1983-like industry cliffs... Spider-Man now meets the devastating force of malice that is Shuma-Gorath.

I tried with all my might to best this hellspawn and couldn't even land a scratch on him before the timer ran out. Shuma-Gorath, motherf******ers.

He then emits a primordial screech and soars off, out of this game. Hopefully he doesn't return in any later games to ruin my day.

Time to finally play as Hulk, and it looks like I nearly have all of the Infinity Stones. I guess Psylocke isn't dead.

She still has the same ballet-like leaps as the previous game. Actually, everyone from that game has the same animations here.

Hulk dishes out a full-on Sparta Kick. He smacked Psylocke so hard, her descendants felt it.

That's it for defeating the regular cast. Your character now has five of the six stones, but unfortunately for them, the last one is with Thanos.

This game's sub-boss, its Goro if you will, is Dr. Doom. Surprised to see Doom in a secondary role here, considering he's portrayed as more powerful than Thanos in the comics (at least, more powerful than regular Thanos... Infinity Gauntlet Thanos, maybe not).

Doom is going to be the next Thanos in the movies, and has some pretty damn big shoes to fill. I just wish Marvel had taken a few years off before starting on the Doom Phase (or that there even was a Doom Phase, as it appears they're just jumping right to his two Avengers movies). The last few years of Marvel made me less-interested in the next Avengers, which is the opposite of what build-up phases exist for. A few years off and a chance to miss the MCU would have worked better.

Doom has a lot of laser-based offense, much like Darkseid over in DC. Lots of beams for this guy.

Lots and lots of beams.

Also, smaller rays.

Hulk defeats him with his super move, CRUSHING HIM WITH A METEOR.

It was nice knowing you, Dr. Doom.

Now we get Thanos. Yeah, THE Thanos. The villains in this game are a pretty massive step up from Magneto, with all respect to Magneto and his Nappa.

Thanos gets all six Infinity Stones for this fight and you get ZERO. This gives him lots of buffs and super-moves. All of his attacks have a ton of weight to them; the power of this guy really jumps off of the screen.

He's fast, too, as we re-create the opening Thanos/Hulk fight of Infinity War that showed you just who the hell they were dealing with. Look closely at the background and we can see several heroes already turned to stone by Thanos, like Scarlet Witch here.

There's Doctor Strange. Come to think of it...all of those characters I asked about at the beginning of this post, the missing big names. They're all here, already victims of Thanos. That's crazy.

Finally, there's Thor, perhaps the biggest omission from this game. Hulk avenges his Infinity War loss by pasting Thanos with a SPARTA KICK, then goes home to his hot redhead girlfriend.

Looking at Hulk's big bear-hands, all I can say is...that is one lucky woman.

I have a feeling Betty here can think of a few ways to make Hulk less grouchy. Hulk is also one lucky dude.

Hulk decides to disembark from their flight early and JUMPS OFF THE PLANE with her in tow. He's hardcore!

I also finished the game with Spider-Man. His ending...ALSO has him going home to a redhead. And he's gonna be a dad!

Chances are, the kid is going to be radioactive. I don't know if I'd celebrate this just yet.

They really are the only things that matter in life. Like, really matter. Not beating 1000 games, not having a life of debauchery or self-indulgence, not making a bunch of money.

And now, music time:

Blackheart's theme is the first one that really made me take notice. Has the kind of prowling menace you'd find in an MK game, and showed me right away that this game was going to have a killer soundtrack.

Doctor Doom's theme has some distinctive Dragonball Z Hyper Dimension vibes to it.

Psylocke's theme...okay, this game really does sound like Dragonball Z Hyper Dimension. If I were to go deep and look into this, I bet there's a reason for this. I don't see any composer overlap, so it's likely a sound chip or instrumentation deal.

That's it for Marvel Super Heroes. Really good game, love the giant character sprites and the special moves leap off the screen. This is my favorite of the four games I've played so far (including the upcoming X-Men vs Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter) and the one I enjoyed the most.

Next up...

...X-Men vs Street Fighter. The third game in this eight-game series, which goes back to the previous game's roster while adding World Warriors. They're really doling out these universes piece by piece aren't they? The actual "Marvel vs Capcom" games aren't even until the last four, and the next one dials back the Marvel characters to make us wait until the fourth game to have them vs the World Warriors.

One last note: This game was dedicated to legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby (1917-1994). If Stan Lee was Shigeru Miyamoto, Jack Kirby was Gunpei Yokoi. He did lots of iconic work for both DC and Marvel, creating characters like Darkseid for the former and Thor for the latter. Truly some of the biggest and most relevant characters. I hope he somehow got to see the golden era of comic book movies that started in the 00's and really flourished in the 10's, much of which used his creations.

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