MARVEL SUPER HEROES: WAR OF THE GEMS
Original Release: Capcom, 1996, SNES
The "original" Infinity War game takes it back to the years of the original comics as a simple belt-scroller beat-em-up with a weird fusion of other elements
Marvel Super Heroes: War of the Gems (SNES, Capcom, 1996)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: SNES Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
Long before there was a MCU ... there was whatever this is. A few years after the original comics came out, Capcom took a crack at doing the Marvel Infinity arcs in video game form (well, a second crack if you want to count their guest appearance in Marvel Super Heroes, which this is DEFINITELY not a port of).
Design-wise you can see how this is a hodgepodge of a bunch of Capcom's other popular stuff of the time. The basic engine is kinda an odd fusion of Final Fight and Mega Man X (though not necessarily representing the best qualities of either). But it's also got stylistic touches from the Marvel arcade fighting games, like the "win quotes" upon successfully completing each level. Aside from those elements it most directly draws from the sorta-prequel Mutant Apocalypse in its structure, though the big difference here is allowing you to choose any character for any level rather than having them locked to their own special levels Arcade's Revenge-style.
The setup differs from the comic story though, in this one the Infinity Stones randomly rained down to Earth somehow, Tony Stark tracks them to four locations that serve as your first four levels. You can pick from Iron Mang, Spider Mang, Hulk, Wolverine or Captain Anus as you freely play each of these levels in whatever order you choose. Once you complete the first four you get another four to take on before the final level in Sigma/Dr. Wily fortress style.
I don't know what it was with comic book games through the 8- and 16-bit eras, but this one continues the general trend of them being weirdly over-difficult. This one is extra strange as the enemies are pretty braindead throughout, they tend to be middling in speed and have extremely predictable and repetitive little patterns and scripts. However, you're given extremely little room for error with just one life per hero and a not-too-generous amount of health and refresh opportunities. The foes are mostly midget Marvel hero clones, but don't underestimate them, a bunch of different ones know the Mandible Claw and can slap it on very easily when they get near you, and it takes off nearly half your health each time. When a character dies you lose them for good, save for a few limited opportunities to find a revive item hidden away in a few of the levels. And the bigger guys move like absolute molasses, compounded by the game continually finding ways to jam in underwater levels (where you face the added difficulty of an Air meter that will also kill you once depleted ... and how an aquarium has enough water in it to get completely submerged I have no idea).
Since this is a late-life SNES title, a couple of elements were included to spice up the otherwise generic belt-scrolling beatings. Each character has a few Street Fighter-style move inputs to do their beams and super moves and etc., many of which come directly from the Marvel Super Heroes arcade game. And once you start taking gems off the supervillains (who really do not make good use of them in their own personal defense), you can equip one to each character to give them some added boost or power (for example giving the Space Gem to Iron Man essentially allows him to fly by repeatedly jumping). This doesn't substantially improve the gameplay but it does make some of the more annoying levels easier to deal with when you get the right hero-gem combo.
But in the end it's just a very "meh" belt scroller with the occasional nice little aesthetic quality as its only real attraction. It must have been a stiff disappointment for some of the kids out there still stuck with their SNES in 1996/1997, especially if they thought this was going to be a port of the arcade game! It feels like it was made halfheartedly with a low budget, and while some effort was put into the graphics and music here and there the fundamental mechanical work feels like it was handled by a Capcom "B" squad just porting in bits and pieces from their better games of the past.
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