Crossover: Reign Of Apocalypse

One of my favorite arcade games when I was growing up was the X-Men Arcade Game, which provided some of the best Beat 'Em Up action around when I was growing up. I fondly remember hanging out at the local bowling alley near my house with my friends and whiling away our Saturdays while we guided various members of Xavier's gifted youngsters through a number devious levels and fought off a horde of canon fodder enemies with the occasional Brotherhood of Evil Mutants member as a boss. Funnily enough, one of my favorite comic book storylines was the acclaimed Age of Apocalypse that Marvel ran in the mid-1990s; the plot focused on what could've been when Xavier was accidentally assassinated by a time-traveller bent on removing Magneto from the gene pool in order to avoid all that silly "let's get rid of the damn dirty humans nonsense." Essentially, Magneto is shocked into benevolence by his friend's untimely demise, but the villain Apocalypse manages to take over the world by starting his "survival of the fittest" war against humanity ten years earlier than he did in the mainstream Marvel universe. I always hoped that an Age of Apocalypse game might eventually come out, but it looks like the closest we'll ever get will be X-Men: Reign of Apocalypse for the Game Boy Advance.

There's an old expression stating that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: Reign of Apocalypse doesn't so run towards imitation as it sprints, leaps, and dives towards outright plagiarism while trying to pretend that it's a wholly original creation. The game follows Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, and Rogue after they accidentally wind up in a parallel dimension (seriously, don't ask) where Apocalypse is sitting pretty on his pink throne. Apparently the parallel dimension changes the X-Men's costumes, too, because the four heroes' outfits are from the 1980s (which is exactly how they appeared in the original arcade game). The retro-clad heroes battle their way through a series of levels which are largely imported directly from the arcade game, though some of the bosses are more recent additions to the comic continuity like Cable and Gambit.

While the arcade game's original incarnation featured six playable characters, Reign of Apocalypse eliminated Colossus and Nightcrawler from the lineup for no foreseeable reason, which is a pity because the latter character was my favorite to play when I was a kid. Other than that, the game itself features the same tight controls and sharp graphics of the original, and is a great addition to any Game Boy Advance library, especially since you can find it on eBay for less than $15.