Hank McCoy (Before the Fur)

So what DO I want in an X-Men game, anyway?

If X-Men: Destiny let me down what would the ideal X-Men game look like?

Well, to date, I think X-Men Legends and X-Men Legends II have come closest to what I’ve always dreamed a top notch X-Men RPG would contain. Sure the voice acting was a little cartoony and it was more linear than you assume an RPG is gonna be, but overall it felt right.

The action, the characters, the story…you were living X-Men.

Of course, I’ve still got a hankering for the old school Commodore 64 Fall of the Mutants. The damn thing barely works right and it’s hard as crap, but I just love that it’s straight out of the comics. It really just IS: the X-Men, in Dallas, fighting all manner of beast and creatures (spacemen and dinosaurs) as all of space and time unnaturally folds on itself, culminating in a showdown with the mystic entity ‘The Adversary’ responsible for the whole thing.

I love that you can just live this story if you want to play this game (albeit in poorly programmed less than 8-bit form. But still). THAT’S what I’d love to see.

I like my X-Men video game scenarios straight up so to speak. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right?

But still, if they just published video games that had the plot of the comics embedded in them you wouldn’t buy the comics, would you? No, the designers seem content to expand on stories and ideas rather than use them wholesale. To differentiate just what piece of the media franchise your buying.

So I’m going to have to live with that, I suppose.

Let’s say you ask me what part of the X-Men Marvel franchise could be better tapped for a game (or a movie, for you Hollywood producers listening)? C’MON- Days of Future Past!

I’ve written about what a landmark story this was for the entire Marvel canon. What I like to imagine is a video game set in this timeline.

Think about it. You roll up a character and pick their mutation. But the setting of the game isn’t Marvel Universe-616 (the mainstream continuity). It’s Future Past in its Terminator style, post-apocalyptic glory. Sentinels have enslaved the human race, forcing them into selected breeding to weed out the possibility of mutation.

Every day new units roll off the line as Master Mold cranks out faster, smarter, more deadly models.

Every day hope is a little dimmer.

If mutants aren’t killed, they’re forced into ‘reservations’ (essentially concentration camps)- IF they’re lucky. Psychics, on the other hand, are controlled with medication and forced to actually assist the Sentinels in hunting down other mutants.

Small pockets of a resistance fight a hopeless war to free all of humanity (and mutanity) from their artificial ‘protectors’. Most are former X-Men. An aged Wolverine, Storm and Kitty Pryde head up whatever forces they can muster. Others might be elements from the Marvel canon you might not expect.

Sure he’s a ruthless tyrant, but Victor Von Doom might have the technological expertise and guile to survive in a world like this. And whatever else you say about the guy, when the extinction of all of humanity is involved he’s going to have something to say about it.

Nick Fury is likely to lead whatever human forces remain (maybe outfitted these days with mass produced Stark enterprises War Machine suits?).

Can you imagine the kind of dark and intense odyssey through the Marvel Universe this could be?

If there’s one thing I’ve been let down by time and again is how rarely Marvel gets back to this part of the X-Men canon. I’ve heard rumblings- bits and pieces of putting this thing into film.

Of course I have my doubts that that’ll turn out the way I want it to. But what about something like this? So hey, if someone wants a suggestion for an X-Men video game DO THAT. Okay?