Captain America and the Avengers (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Mindscape's 1993 license-based beat 'em up for the Super Nintendo, Captain America and the Avengers.

Played through on the normal difficulty level with Captain America.

Data East's 1991 arcade beat 'em up staring Captain America is widely considered a classic. It was a good beat 'em up (it was no Final Fight, but it was pretty good) with some extremely impressive graphics and sound. The home ports varied quite a bit in quality between versions, with the Sega Genesis version easily sitting on top of the pile. Of course, Data East themselves co-produced it with Opera House, and it is a fair, somewhat scaled back representation to the original. The Game Gear version was impressively good, and the Game Boy version was surprisingly reasonable. So how about the SNES title?

Well, it certainly looks the nicest out of the major console ports. It's all super colorful and cartoony (though it's a bit too dark). The characters all are detailed for how small the sprites are, and the backgrounds look good, though they are missing a ton of details from the original coin-op. The cinema scenes between levels look pretty sweet, too.

The sound is pretty poor - the music is based on the original tracks, but the instruments make it sound pretty weak and tinny. The voices, the few samples that were actually included on the SNES, are clear but super compressed and artificial sounding, and the sound effects pack no power whatsoever. Half of them sound like the white noise "punch" sound that was so popular on the NES.

And then we get to the game play. The controls are the same as the Genesis and arcade port, sure, but they are super-sluggish and not terribly precise. It's pretty annoying trying to line up long-range shots, your character is a bit too slow to turn around, and it all feels too loose and choppy. The enemies also have an annoying period of invincibility after being hit, which draws out the battles too much. And since they can still hit you half the time when you're still blinking, it can be easy to get caught in a juggle that wipes out half of your life. These issues together make this what is probably the hardest home version of the game. It doesn't feel good, or natural, or fair most of the time. Unless you get cheap on the AI, you will get destroyed left and right.

I love the arcade and Genesis games, but the SNES version is a real stinker. I remember having really high hopes for it back when, and it couldn't have disappointed me more than it did when I rented it. If you want to play a home version of this, the Sega Genesis version is where it's at. Remember how the SNES version of Pit Fighter compared to the Genesis one? The disparity is about the same here.

If you are a masochist, though, be my guest.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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