X-Men's Reset Button Doesn't Exist

[Venom]

So I was reading trough cracked and I stumbled on something that frustrated me for no more when I played
X men I tried this game countless times eventually just unplugging it , I just could not figure it out and almost 20 years later I know why ................ how the hell did I not know this

The 1993 X-Men game for the Sega Genesis is mostly a standard beat-'em-up, with little strategy beyond "walk forward and punch/stab/laser eyes everything." It's a superhero action game, not Skyrim.
But at the end of the penultimate level you're left in a nearly blank room with a computer console and a single sentence for instructions: "Reset the computer." Since every obstacle up to this point has been defeated with violence, you naturally assume that you need to punch a computer into submission. (The other lesson games teach us as children: If it isn't meant to be stolen, it is meant to be destroyed.) When you can't find any computers that respond to super-beatings, you start wondering if you missed defeating an enemy or flipping a hidden switch, and you scour every inch of the level in the hopes of finding the secret to progressing.




And you will never, ever find it. Not if you play for the next 20 straight hours, raging in frustration, convinced that you got a glitched copy of the game. That's because the solution doesn't exist anywhere within the game universe: It exists in the real world. "Reset the computer" means you have to physically reset your game console.
And think for a moment about how counterintuitive that is. Gamers generally only touch the reset button when a game freezes, because ... you know, it resets your progress. This was before games automatically saved every five minutes -- a poorly timed reset could cost you everything. Had the game been riddled with obscure puzzles and meta references from the beginning, it's possible gamers would have figured it out, but who on Earth is going to get that fourth-wall-breaking reference late in a game where the most complicated puzzle up to that point was trying to figure out why the developers bothered to include Cyclops when everyone was going to play as Wolverine?


It's no wonder that most gamers either got stuck or figured it out by accident. And that's not counting players who reset the game for real by holding the button down too long or played the game on the handheld Sega Nomad, which incidentally didn't have a reset button. The last level could have been a montage of satanic rituals and orgies for all the people who actually saw it.
Meanwhile, the Nintendo DS RPG The World Ends With You, whose developers are firm believers of the "fool me twice, shame on me" school of game design, pulls basically the same trick. One of the game's special enemies is a sleeping pig who runs away the moment you attack it. If for some reason you're really dedicated to murdering this innocent animal, you need to close your DS to put it in sleep mode. Get it? Because the pig was sleeping? No?

[Tsar]

I knew what to do back then by mistake I played as cyclopes. Preferred x-men 2 clone wars by far.

[hideinlight]

Now that I think of it, this is one game I've never managed to finish. Could never get past the giant robots.

[SephirothDVR]

I remember Metal Gear Solid had a boss that read your Memory card saves and if I'm not mistaken you had to plug your control in the player 2 port to beat him?

Metal Gear Solid 3 had a sniper boss. Old guy in wheel chair, The One, I think? The first time I got to him, I saved and exited the game. A few days later when I switched my PS2 on again and loaded MGS3, the old guy died of old age, lol? This only happens if you save there and restart the game a few days later.

[bradbear117]

I remember Metal Gear Solid had a boss that read your Memory card saves and if I'm not mistaken you had to plug your control in the player 2 port to beat him?

Metal Gear Solid 3 had a sniper boss. Old guy in wheel chair, The One, I think? The first time I got to him, I saved and exited the game. A few days later when I switched my PS2 on again and loaded MGS3, the old guy died of old age, lol? This only happens if you save there and restart the game a few days later.

I once shot him in a cut scene way early in the game. You never encounter him then!