Description

As the title suggests, Captain America and the Avengers is a Marvel superhero themed side-scrolling beat-em-up game, released by Data East in 1991. The evil Red Skull has gathered an army of super-villains and plans to take over the world. Now, that’s something that must be stopped! And just who’s gonna to do that? You guess three times.

The game features a classic single-player mode and two player MP, with four available characters to choose from: the eponymous Captain America and three of the Avengers, namely Vision, Iron Man and the Hawkey. The characters move in a side-scrolling isometric scene, they can jump and use both melee and ranged attacks (see controls chart below), and the goal is to pass all stages by eliminating all the nemies the game throws at you.

Seems simple enough, right? Well—not so surprisingly—the reality is somewhat different from the expectation. The point is to get your money, and in order for the arcade to get your money you have to die. I mean, it’s nothing really brutal on ‘normal’ difficulty setting, but unless you’re a real pro, you will die. And fortunately, it won’t cost you a penny anymore (even though your ego may still get hurt nevertheless). Just hit the coin-bay button and keep playing. If the coin-counter value is greater or equal to ‘1’, the game even let’s you restore your health by hitting the start button mid-play. This way (if you’re a noob like me and die a lot) you can skip the ‘Continue?’ timeout counter that normally flashes out on the screen once your health drops to zero. Note however, that it also prevents you from selecting another character, since the game gives you that option only when you die (and the timeout appears).

Now, Aliens vs Predator aside, I’m not much of a brawler fan. Really. But I did enjoy Captain America. Although the Game Gear version of the game received only mixed reviews, because of its below-mediocre visuals and audio (and I reckon other ports didn’t do any better), the original arcade game is all but a mix of crappy sprites and even crapier music. Sure, the texts in menus and cutscenes do look like they came straight out of some ‘el Cheapo’ indie game. And no, I’m not saying the character sprites couldn’t be sharper—god damn it, do you even antialias, Data East? But, and it is but with a capital B, the background graphics look  like an actual comic book printed on paper. And that certainly adds to the atmosphere of a Marvel superhero game.

The gameplay feels fresh and—without denying—has a certain appeal to it. After so many bad brawlers I’ve recently played, Captain America was a surprisingly enjoyable experience. Yet 1990’s brought us so many brawlers (some of them worse and some of them better), that Captain America and the Avengers just can’t keep up the pace—in other words, even though it is otherwise a good and enjoyable game, its lack of eye candy and other bells and whistles pulls it down into the sea of averageness, which is a shame really.

[Veo]

CONTROLS:

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Both P1 and P2:

UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT → self explanatory

BUTTON 1 → punch

BUTTON 2 → jump

L/R + B2  → jump attack

B2 then D+B1 → ranged attack