Games what not should never have been done ported to PC
I was watching the Simpsons and Family Guy season finales (don’t get me started on Family Guy) and in the midst of it all were about 8 million X3/Last Stand commercials, because apparently FOX thinks there are still one or two people on the planet that have been hiking, or perhaps trapped in a well and don’t know about it. There was a commercial for a new X-Men game, looked cool, lots of action and it actually was for PC as well as all the other consoles. So I grabbed a copy of X-Men: The Official Game, everytime I say or type that name it makes me laugh.
It’s meant to be a plot bridge between X2 and X3, the X-Men go back to Alkalai Lake to retrieve parts of Cerebro that Stryker stole and in it you’re supposed to find out why Nightcrawler doesn’t appear in X3. The game has the usual movie cast voice overs and apparently quite a long and involved script, written by Chris Claremont and Zak Penn, but I’ll never know it. The controls are im-freakin-possible! I remapped the keyboard, I connected my USB gamepad controller and still there’s just too much to do and not enough ways to configure stuff to make it all convenient. I look at games like CoH or WoW and while they have an awful lot of powers and skills to activate, at the least you can see what numbers apply to what in an overlay on screen. Not so for this one.
Now it is pretty wicked to play Wolverine (he’s a rage-fueled hand to hand fighter) and Iceman (he was a little trickier, riding ice slides while making ranged attacks), but the absolute best was playing Nightcrawler. Mmmm, teleportation! From nearly any point on the map (aside from some Danger Room non-teleport zones) you see little dark blue markers that indicate where you can *bamf* to. He also gets some teleport attacks where you *bamf* in behind an enemy and proceed to punch and kick the hell out of them. Plus he swings on poles (vertical), he runs down walls, teleport to a horizontal bar and he’ll do an acrobatic grab/flip before landing, very stylish. The secondary X-Men, Colossus and Storm are party-NPCs in certain missions, you can’t really control them except in a partner attack and often your mission goal is to keep them alive, when unfortunately their AI seems to actively look for trouble.
Overall, I liked what I played of it, then found codes to unlock the Danger Room missions and extra costumes, you can get classic comic book costumes and street clothes for each of the characters, though Nightcrawler’s “street clothes” are the clothes he attacked the White House in, not exactly “cool” or a happy memory to recall. It’s a fun game, but I feel like it would be a lot better on a console platform than the PC. Still I appreciate them thinkin’ of us poor PC gamers. 
