My Beginnings As A Gamer - Part 3

The last 2 weeks saw me writing about two games I owned for the Sega Genesis: NFL Football '94 and Virtual Bart. Both of these were horrid excuses for games, since either I didn't understand what I was doing or the controls were poor. Luckily enough, my childhood was spared with a third game: X-Men 2: Clone Wars.

This game was a great sidescroller. Both my brother and I ended up spending the most time with X-Men 2 out of the 3 games because we loved X-Men. Wolverine and Nightcrawler were my favorites.

Story-wise, I had no clue what was happening. Apparently these dudes called the Phalanx are out to get everyone on Earth. Don’t blame me for not caring, the story was presented as text on a screen, and I was a child. Let’s kill them already!

My brother and I had the game down pat for the most part. Through trial and error, we realized that each character was different. With time, we found that switching up the characters would make the game easier, because some were better than others for specific levels or bosses. For the most part, I ended up with Wolverine, but Cyclops was great as well, and Beast helped out a lot during boss battles.

The great part about the game is that Magneto ends up joining you, so you get to play as him. It was pretty cool for the time, but I never got the hang of playing as him, nor did I see any advantage in using him.

The game was fairly tough in my opinion. To this day, I have not beaten it. As a child, I was convinced that with time and patience, I would get through the most of it. Unlike Virtual Bart, the game was not frustratingly difficult because the controls were very tight. Each playthrough would see me getting slightly better, as I was just learning from experience.

As mentioned before, my brother and I also learned from trial and error. I guess that wouldn’t fly nowadays, but seeing as this was the best game we owned, we didn’t care about learning from the game this way. It allowed us to share more time together, as well as think of new ways to get past the tricky parts.

Sometimes we would just give up and put the game on hold because parts of the game were too hard to figure out, especially when you’re thrown into a boss fight. I knew there were cheat codes, and I was very tempted to skip a level or two, but oddly enough, the game would not accept the cheat codes. Even to this day, the cheat codes don't work on my hard copy and console, and I have no clue why.

Overall, X-Men 2: Clone Wars is a game I’ve always been fond of. It made playing my Sega Genesis worth it, despite lacking many of its must-own games (i.e. any of the Sonics, Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, Destiny). If you’ve never played it, definitely give it a chance.