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I love super heroes. As cool as they are, they’re even better when they team up, and any fan worth his/her salt was most likely salivating when Spider-Man/X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge. The prospect of the web slinger teaming up with Marvel’s marvelous mutants for a video game romp seems to be the stuff of dreams. The Genesis had to wait a bit longer for it though, as it came out first on the SNES. How did the Sega version fare?
Syndicate was quite a popular title during Bullfrog Production’s run, which ended when it was gobbled up by Electronic Arts in 1995. Playing like the love child of The Matrix and Wall Street, the game tasks players with all sorts of nasty objectives, like assassinating rival corporations or brainwashing targets into obedience.
It seems that no one liked Last Action Hero. The Governator was beginning his slow downward spiral into movie retirement, and his first movie after the incredible T2: Judgment Day got trounced at the box office by Sleepless in Seattle. So poorly did the movie do, that Shwarzenegger’s own salary was virtually equal to its opening weekend gross. Of course, Sony tried to capitalized on the movie with a video game tie-in, and to say that the game mimics the film isn’t entirely accurate. Let’s just say that as bad as the movie may be, the game is infinitely worse. Horrible gameplay, repetitive enemies, brutal difficulty, and levels that go on way too long are only some of the problems that plague this doorstop.
After Sega scored a hit with Eternal Champions, it began to look for more ways to keep the characters in the public eye. Spin offs were quickly green-lighted for both the Game Gear and the Genesis, and anxious fans got X-Perts. Not exactly the game they were waiting for, and its development was almost canceled several times. In the end, Sega released a product almost no one was happy with, and it was a black eye to the face of an otherwise popular franchise.
Recognized by Genesis fans as one of the hardest action/platformers of all time, Shadow of the Beast reportedly owes its notorious difficulty to a higher refresh rate that made it run almost 20% faster than it should have. Lots of game pads lost their lives taking on this incredibly hard game, but there are those gamers out there who had the patience (and the extra controllers) to actually play through to the end. Are you man enough for the challenge?