X-Men: Children of the Atom
X-Men: Children of the Atom
Arcade Retrospective
Arcade Retrospective
In The Begining
Back in the early 90s Capcom changed the gaming world when it released Street Fighter II into the arcades. Kids would line up to get the chance to drop in their quarters to punch and kick their way into the next generation. Capcom had become the king of the arcade and helped to lay the ground rules for the entire fighting game genre. An interesting note is that the combo system that almost every fighting game relies on came about completely by accident during development of Street Fighter II. The dev team found that the timing of certain punches and kicks could be strung together, but the combos were hard to work out and so the team simply left them in figuring players would never find out about them. They did and this one bug led us to the combo crazy fighters we have now.
Capcom would continue to tweak and expand the base Street Fighter II game for a number of years in what many now consider Capcom syndrome. But while the studio seemed content to release update after update to their main franchise, they were also working on lots of other fighting games, some of which didn't make inroads into the US, that would help them once again change the genre while everyone else was still trying to play catch up with Street Fighter II. Among these new fighting games would be the company's first foray into thier long partnership with Marvel Comics with X-Men: Children of the Atom, a game that would help usher in a new age in fighters.
V.S. Fighting
While Street Fighter II was the king of the arcade in the early 90s, the X-Men animated show was the king of Saturday mornings. At this this time comic books were also big business (far more than they are now) and it wasn't uncommon to see a comic book selling a million copies; something that X-Men #1 managed to do. We also saw the death of Superman and Batman getting his back broken. It was quite the time to be a comic fan. So when Capcom joined forces with Marvel for an arcade project it made perfect sense on a number of levels. Capcom could create the new fighting game and Marvel would provide the characters and lore.
X-Men: Children of the Atom was released into arcades in Japan in December of 1994 and the United States in January of 1995. The game upped the overall speed of the action when compared to Street Fighter II, but the real magic came from the combo and super system as well as the tiered stages. Combos were now the main focus of the action and you can now pull them off even while in mid-air. Add in the Super Jump, forward and backward tech rolls, aiming of projectiles, stages with floors that fall away mid-fight and being able to pick between automatic and manual blocking and you a fighting game that is laying the groundwork for a fighting game series that will challenge Street Fighter in popularity.
Fatal Attractions
X-Men: Children of the Atom has a story, probably more so than other games that would come after it in the series. It's loosely based on the "Fatal Attractions" storyline that had recently been going on in the comic book series. Magneto is at it again and wants to hit the entire planet with an electromagnetic pulse that would drive humanity back into a new Dark Age. Mutants having powers would then naturally be able to take control and the world would become theirs. Those mutants that want a piece of this new world join up with Magneto and the game has a plot. Sure, it's not all that deep or stick all that close to the comic it borrows from, but it works.
The game ran on the CPS-2 arcade system and was praised at the time for capturing the look and feel of the X-Men comic at the time. Animations were bright and colorful and the included voice acting helped give each character an even more unique feel. Speaking on characters, X-Men: Children of the Atom features ten choices to fight as with six coming from the X-Men and four come from Magneto's side. Juggernaut is the games sub-boss, but he isn't playable unless you have the PC port of the game. Capcom had it in their contract with Marvel that they could include one Capcom character to the mix and added Akuma as a secret boss. This was a big push as the chatter made his debut only a few months earlier in the release of Super Street Fighter II.
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Berserker Ports
X-Men: Children of the Atom was popular enough to see a number of translations to the home video game consoles the came onto the scene a few years after its release into arcades. The game predated the PlayStation and Saturn by only a few years, so getting the game onto the consoles was a win, win situation. Capcom could get X-Men: Children of the Atom into the home and the console makers could show off the power of their fancy new consoles. The game saw release on the two major disc based consoles; the PlayStation and the Sega Saturn. But these two versions were quite a bit different.
The version on the PlayStation was panned at the time with critics complaining about the unbearable loadtimes the game suffered from. IGN would dive deeper calling the graphics "annoying and out-dated" and that the audience has "grown old of the senseless button mashing" the game demands. They went on to state that the game would have been a perfect fit for the 16-bit generation, even though those consoles could never handle it. Then again, these are the guys that gave WWF RAW on the Xbox, the worst wrestling game to ever grace the Xbox and one of the worst ever, a "9.1". Oh, and they also gave the graphics of Mega Man 9 a "3" so you get the idea.
The first time comic book superheroes have been successfully translated to game format
Sega Saturn Magazine
The Saturn port of X-Men: Children of the Atom fared much better on the review front and was a much better quality port than what the PlayStation received. The Sega Saturn wasn't all that more powerful than the PlayStation, but where the Saturn held the advantage in the fighting game front was in the RAM cart that the Saturn could use. This meant that the game was almost a perfect port of the arcade and would not at all look out of place in on the Dreamcast, PS2 or Xbox.
The game also saw a DOS release from Probe Software, of which I had as a kid, but this version, like the PlayStation port wasn't well received. Granted it scored better than the PlayStation version and was fairly impressive for a DOS game with GameSpot saying it was "an admirable and near-exact conversion of Capcom's 1995 arcade hit" and "proves that the PC is indeed a viable platform for fighting games". Aside from the lower overall resolution one weird issue of the PC port was that you couldn't chain combos together like in the arcade.
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Super Heroes
X-Men: Children of the Atom was a big hit all around, but Capcom wasn't done tweaking their new franchise and their followup game would expand beyond the X-Men franchise and incorporate the larger Marvel universe.