X-Men: Children of the Atom - Wolverine

Played by Xavier.

I received this CPS2 game quite a long time ago. It was the second arcade game that became a part of my collection, coming with its own separate CPS2 board and cabinet.

X-Men: Children of the Atom, despite it's lack of popularity today, is the first game in what would eventually become the "Marvel Vs. Capcom" series or simply the "Versus" series. While all of these games are commonly considered to be "Broken" (a word that's thrown around a bit too much these days), some titles, like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 had certain parts of the games that balanced themselves around that "Brokenness" gameplay-wise more than others. As far as X-Men COTA goes, Capcom had no idea what absurdity they had just created when they released it, and it shows. This game is truly broken, and explaining every reason why in depth would be impossible even if they tripled the amount of characters you were allowed to insert into your video description. The gameplay in the video itself shows you what breaks the game the most: the infinite combo loops. A lot of these games have infinites, but COTA just has a ridiculous amount of them in an unusually loose combo system.

The production quality and overall flow/feel of this game is quite noteworthy. The animations are smooth, the music and voices are memorable (the voices being from the extremely popular 1992 X-Men animated series that was still running at the time this game was released). The gameplay still works, it just simply becomes less competitive the better you become at it due to those infinite combos and other shenanigans. Typically, it would be the other way around.

The game does have a few weird visual moments, as with most CPS2/CPS1 games. Usually if your board is very old/overused, a few visual effects may suddenly become less prominent in some games (though it usually isn't noticeable to a casual player/viewer, and this shouldn't be confused with sprites blinking out for a moment as it's a common occurrence in many CPS2 and other arcade games). This board issue generally happens with CPS3 boards the most. There don't appear to be any diminishing effects on COTA however, even on really used up CPS2 boards.

This game was ported to the Sega Saturn, PC, and Playstation. Of these ports, the JP Saturn version is supposedly by far the best. For some reason, the US version of it is missing frames. The PS1 version of it is missing even more frames and also came out quite late. It also had really lengthy load times and some odd, random slowdown, like some other PS1 ports of Capcom fighting games. As for the PC version, I've never played it, or know anyone that's played it. There doesn't seem to be much information on it.

This play-through uses Wolverine, who is completely ridiculous in almost every aspect of his existence in this game. He's fast, has some unusual frame traps, a small hurtbox, and some great use of his meter that can actually allow him to heal himself, another to make his movement/combos/recovery even better, as well as a basic "Super Attack" ability. He is considered one of the top tier characters, and often considered the best in the game. Akuma, who is a hidden character in this game, is even more questionably designed than the rest of the cast due to his attacks being able to put his opponent in infinite blockstun. His AI is surprisingly not too difficult to defeat even at maximum difficulty and without taking damage, especially in comparison to his SSF2T counterpart.

This game was supposed to actually start having some footage captured almost a year ago, but we never got around to it until recently. Xavier claims beating the game at max difficulty without taking damage isn't too bad if you're familiar with the series and can pull off the infinites. The AI isn't as good as it is in later games in the series (notably MvC2), and upping the difficulty in the arcade versions of many of these games doesn't change things as much as some players might expect. The most infamous AI here is Magneto, the final boss. As long as you keep pressure on him, and never let him use his super (as far as I know, it's unavoidable with most characters) you should do well. Akuma's AI, despite not being that great for a hidden boss, can actually take advantage of his block strings and frame data, but as long as you know your character/combos, and punish accordingly, he's not a threat compared to Magneto. In a lot of these types of play-throughs, raw "Ume-Shoryus" tend to work quite a bit against the AI if you know their patterns well, but in this game, it's almost always a bad idea.