If there was a video game that perfectly embodied the edgy, sexually charged machismo of Marvel Comics Ultimates era, it would be the forgotten 2005 Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfect.
Miracle nemesis, made by former StarCraft: Spirit Developer, Nihilistic Software, is a grim Mortal Kombat Beat em up fighting game inspired by the style Marvel Nemesis: The Imperfect Comic. Marvel Nemesis was released on PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Nintendo DS, and Sony’s forgotten son, the PSP, in September 2005.
The story follows an overly ambitious scientist named Doctor Niles Van Roekelwho tries human experiments with a mysterious green alien serum in hopes of creating the ultimate life form. Of course, Marvel title heroes like The Thing, Elektra, and Spider-Man will have to fight their infected teammates, aliens, and Van Roekel’s elemental cybernetic freak azoids The imperfect.
Due to Van Roekel’s alien virus, every infected Marvel character has a smug arrogance that contrasts with their comic book traits. While I don’t remember the game’s plot, its character imaginations and ridicules kept vacant real estate in my head as some of the most ridiculous and occasionally iconic line deliveries I’ve ever heard in a fighting game, including Spider-Man telling a defeated enemy that they just got a “net-sling-ass-kick” and Magneto denies his opponents in a bored and genteel way.
Even though the game’s trailer tried to lure players with buzzwords like “authentic superpowers” and “destructible environments”, publications and players didn’t buy what Marvel was selling. IGN found the use of the word imperfect in the game appropriate and rated it 4.8 out of 10 points, with the game’s mediocre move-sets cited as one of the biggest flaws as a fighting game.
“Once you’ve learned one, you’ve learned pretty much all of them,” said Jeremy Dunham in his IGN Review.
Game spot gave Marvel Nemesis a 6.4 of 10 for its “ugly in-engine cutscenes”, “homogeneous gameplay at the push of a button” and its unbalanced combat system. It also received mixed reviews on Metacritic, with a score of 53 percent and some devastating player ratings. A typo-laden review from a guy named SumDood made two sayings:
“Terrible game! Not appealing, very confusing and if not to say badass. I wish EA could, for once, put its stamp on something better than sports games! You have all the Madden money that is being spent wisely! “
I was a teenager when I first played Marvel Nemesis and every valid criticism others had about the game was why I found it so funny. The game’s simple push of a button movement set served as a soft barrier to entry. As my previous experience with fighting games has been limited to Tekken day tournament and Virtua Fighter 4, I found Marvel Nemesis‘crispy, overly violent finishers that could see characters evaporate to dust as opposed to the squeaky clean rendering of their on-screen counterparts.
My favorite stage, The Daily Bugle, was probably one of the most broken levels in the game as it was littered with explosive surrounding objects and there was a high probability of defeating an opponent simply by chasing them away from Peter Parker’s workplace. Oddly enough, I had no problem with Parker throwing explosive barrels at his superhero colleagues and not pulling his punches. In fact, I’ve made my own head canon that Uncle Ben Parker told him to kill them all on his deathbed instead of making a long diatribe about responsibility before it was cool.
To be fair, children are notorious for poor understanding of media. But I would argue for my worship Marvel Nemesis was thanks to his Edgelord content. That made it for me out of the crowd of other Marvel games that were in line with their movie mates. Hopefully we’ll get another Marvel fighting game as uncompromisingly jaded as Marvel Nemesis.
.
