I came to the X-Men Genesis game completely backwards, like most of my retro gaming discoveries. My daughter found it at a used game store in 2012, picked it up because she remembered the cartoon from when she was little. “Dad, you gotta try this one,” she said, setting up her Genesis at my place. “It’s got four-player co-op.” I didn’t really know what that meant back then – hell, I was still figuring out what made these old games worth playing in the first place.
Turns out it meant cramming four controllers into this little plastic hub called a multitap, which looked like some kind of gaming octopus. The thing barely fit in the Genesis controller ports, and the cords got tangled worse than Christmas lights. But when we fired it up and I saw four different X-Men characters on screen at once, something clicked. This wasn’t just a game – it was chaos management software disguised as entertainment.
You pick your mutant from six options: Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Dazzler, or Colossus. Each one plays completely different, which probably seems obvious now but blew my mind when I was still learning that video games could be more than just “move right and jump on things.” Wolverine slashes everything up close. Cyclops shoots laser beams from across the screen. Storm electrocutes groups of enemies. Nightcrawler teleports around like some kind of blue demon. Even Dazzler, who everyone seems to hate, has these light blasts that can clear out entire sections of bad guys.
The first time I played solo, I thought it was decent enough. Standard beat-em-up stuff – walk right, punch robots, don’t die. But then my daughter convinced a couple of her friends to come over for what she called “proper four-player action,” and suddenly I understood why she’d been so excited about this particular cartridge.
Four-player gaming is complete madness. The screen fills up with mutants throwing special moves, enemies exploding in showers of sparks, and these massive robot Sentinels stomping around trying to crush everyone. The Genesis starts chugging like an old pickup truck climbing a hill – frame rate drops to about three frames per second when everyone’s using their powers at once. But nobody cares because you’re too busy laughing at the absolute chaos happening on screen.
The politics of character selection fascinated me as someone who’d never experienced this kind of group gaming before. In construction, you have clear hierarchies – foreman makes decisions, everyone else follows orders. But four-player X-Men? That’s pure democracy, and democracy gets messy fast. Everyone wants Wolverine because he’s Wolverine. Someone’s gotta play Dazzler, and nobody wants to be the Dazzler guy. Watching my daughter and her friends negotiate who gets which character taught me more about group dynamics than twenty years of managing construction crews.
I ended up gravitating toward Nightcrawler because teleporting behind enemies felt like cheating in the best possible way. You could disappear, reappear behind some Sentinel, and start wailing on it before it knew what hit it. Plus, nobody else seemed particularly interested in him, which solved the character selection problem nicely.
The combat system is beautifully simple – punch, kick, jump, mutant power. That’s it. No complicated button combinations, no frame-perfect timing nonsense that makes modern fighting games feel like homework. Just pick a direction and start hitting things. But each character’s mutant power works completely differently, so you’ve got six distinct play styles wrapped up in the same basic control scheme.
What really got me was how the game forces cooperation without being preachy about it. You can’t just button-mash your way through the later levels – those Sentinels will absolutely destroy you if you try to Rambo them solo. Someone needs to distract while others attack from behind. Someone needs to save their mutant power for the killing blow. Someone needs to grab the health power-ups and share them with whoever’s almost dead. It’s teamwork disguised as mindless violence.
The level design is completely bonkers in that special 90s comic book way. You start on city streets fighting random thugs, then suddenly you’re in the X-Men’s training facility, then outer space, then some alien planet that looks like someone mixed Alien with a Pink Floyd album cover. The backgrounds are gorgeous when they’re not stuttering under the weight of four players and a screen full of explosions. That Yamaha sound chip makes every punch sound like it could crack concrete, and the music drives you forward with these synthetic beats that somehow never get annoying.
Playing through the campaign with a full group becomes this shared endurance test. The continue system is brutal – when someone dies, you get this countdown timer, and if nobody feeds it another life, that’s it. Game over. Back to the beginning like some kind of digital purgatory. We developed elaborate resource-sharing agreements that would’ve made communist economists proud. Who’s got continues left? Who’s hoarding lives? Who accidentally walked into that pit and wasted our last resurrection?
I’ve played through X-Men solo several times now, using save states and modern conveniences that make retro gaming manageable for adults with responsibilities. It’s still fun, but something’s missing. The shared suffering, maybe. The collective groan when someone accidentally triggers their mutant power at the wrong moment and wastes it on a single weak enemy. The negotiations over who gets the next continue.
That’s what I didn’t understand about these old multiplayer games when I first started collecting – they weren’t just software, they were social technology. X-Men on Genesis was an excuse for people to crowd around a TV and share the same emotional rollercoaster. Every victory belonged to the group. Every defeat was a group failure that required group problem-solving.
The difficulty curve is absolutely mental. First couple levels, you feel invincible – Wolverine can slice through basic enemies like wet paper. Then the game introduces those massive Sentinel robots with more health than seems reasonable and attacks that strip half your life bar in one hit. Suddenly that simple combat system requires actual strategy and communication.
I’ve got the game running perfectly now on my MiSTer setup, crisp pixels and zero input lag. Sometimes I’ll fire it up when people visit, try to recreate that four-player magic. It works to an extent – people still have fun, still laugh at the chaos. But there’s something about discovering this kind of cooperative mayhem for the first time that can’t be replicated. Maybe it’s because I approach it differently now, as someone who understands game design and frame rates and technical limitations. Or maybe some gaming experiences are lightning in a bottle, dependent on specific circumstances and specific people and specific moments in your life when everything aligns just right.
Either way, I still think it’s one of the best beat-em-ups ever made for the Genesis. Clunky? Absolutely. Technically perfect? Not even close. But pure, undiluted cooperative fun? That’s exactly what it delivered, and that’s why it’s earned a permanent spot in my collection.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
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