The Best X-Men Games No One Played

5. Before Marvel Ultimate Alliance, There Was X-Men

So, picture this: it's 2004, Fox Kids still rules children's TV, and the X-Men are everywhere. Not content with re-runs of the formidable nineties cartoon, Marvel also air another series called X-Men: Evolution. Fox have back-to-back success at the box office with X-Men and X2: X-Men United, and Joss Whedon is in the midst of his own comics series based on the team, dubbed Astonishing X-Men.

In short, the X-Men craze is still going strong, and was long into its second decade as Marvel's most bankable property. Unfortunately it was also a period marred by uninspiring tie-in video games. Now the X-Men were more fortunate than most in that they had actually featured in several great titles by this point in time, including the iconic nineties arcade game, Marvel vs Capcom, and later X2: Wolverine's revenge, a tie-in for the film that boasted a completely original story, written by legendary comics writer Larry Hama.

Be that as it may, genuinely great comic book video games were few and far between, with Spider-Man 2 the only one to really show the potential comic book properties had in the gaming medium. The X-Men, comparatively, were yet to find the same kind of title.

Today's Raven Software is sadly no longer the studio it once was - an unfortunate casualty of Activision's obsession with Call of Duty - but back in the early noughties they were on the up. Raven led development on the seminal Jedi Knight games for LucasArts, and quickly carved out a niche as a studio capable of adapting licenses into good - if not great - video games. The X-Men were next on the agenda, and the end result ended up being so much more than just a decent dungeon crawler - it became a fantastic introduction to Marvel Comics.