Throwback Thursday: X-Men Children of The Atom
Robert Lewis Knuckles III
“The Real Beginning of The vs. Series”
With Marvel vs Capcom Infinite coming out pretty soon there has been an issue with the game having no X-Men characters. Well I want to talk about the game that introduced us to the vs. series and that’s X-Men Children of The Atom.
X-Men Children of The Atom came out for the arcades in January 1995. The time where arcade games were awesome. We didn’t have social media to know about an upcoming game we would have to look at a gaming magazine. Children of The Atom did come out for the Sega Saturn on April 6 1996 and Playstation on February 1998 and people stay away from the Playstation version.
X-Men Children of The Atom is 2D fighting game made by Capcom that features X-Men characters 90’s X-Men television series. You can play as 10 characters. It features Wolverine that can heal and use his claws and a fast rush down character, Cyclops that uses his optic blast, Colossus the strongest of the X-Men and can use super armor, Iceman that has good defense and uses ice attacks, Storm who uses wind and lightning attacks she’s the only X-Men that can fly and Psylocke is another fast character who uses psychic energy and can use ninjutsu. The villains feature Omega Red who can use his tentacles, Sentinel the biggest character and a cheap punk, Silver Samurai that uses energy on his sword and Spinal who can teleport and use her six arms in combat. The games features two bosses. Sub boss Juggernaut another large and strong character and last boss Magneto who’s also cheap. Akuma is a secret character in the game. Akuma has his Street Fighter II character sprite.
Just like in Street Fighter players have meter called X-Gauge. The gauge starts at level 1 for X-Power. When it gets to the middle players reach level 2 X-Ability. X-Ability can have players tech their opponents whether it’s escaping a throw or recovering from the ground. This consumes parts of the X-Power. Level 3 is Hyper X which is the super combo. Player’s will see a huge X on the screen when performing this move.
Children of The Atom featured high jump, air combo, off the ground combo and more. You see these following features in future upcoming vs series games. The stages were pretty cool. Everyone had their own stage. The most noticeable had to be Spinal’s due to the fact the stage floor breaks three times.
X-Men Children of The Atom is a fun game. What caught my attention were the characters. X-Men is my favorite superhero team and seeing them in a fighting game was a dream. You can make the argument that without this game we might’ve never gotten the Marvel vs. Capcom series. We have to pay homage to this game when playing or making a Marvel vs. Capcom game.
