Marvel Super Heroes Review

Marvel Super Heroes is a Street Fighter Alpha-style fighting game that features characters from the classic Marvel Comics lineup. Four characters (Psylocke, Wolverine, Juggernaut, and Magneto) return from Capcom's previous comic-based fighter, X-Men: Children of the Atom. New characters include Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, and more. It was an exciting arcade game, but the PlayStation version lacks any real punch and falls flat by comparison.

The game differs from the pack via its inclusion of gems that litter the landscape. You can pick up the gems and use them on command, resulting in brief power-ups to the character's speed, power, life, etc. Other than that, it's just basic Street Fighter action, complete with fireballs, dragon punches, and the like. The arcade version was a great game and differed enough from the Street Fighter and X-Men games to be entertaining. The PlayStation version has virtually the same gameplay.

Graphically, MSH looks all right. The characters and backgrounds are large and colorful. But the game also produces an awful lot of slowdown, and it's missing quite a few frames of character and background animation. The slowdown is even more apparent when picking larger characters such as Juggernaut and Blackheart. The music in MSH is fairly good and the speech is nice and crisp, unlike the Saturn version, which produced tinny, annoying sound effects.

The PlayStation version of MSH is tolerable, but it lost the arcade game's soul in the translation. The missing frames and slowdown don't help much, either. While I found the arcade game a blast, this version just seemed dull and boring. Whether this can be attributed to the translation itself or the fact that several, mostly better, Capcom fighters have been released in arcades since Marvel, I don't know. Rent it first and see if it's your thing, and for all of you who own both a PlayStation and a Saturn, you're slightly better off getting the Saturn version, as it doesn't slow down as much, has better color, and more frames of animation.