LJN's Wolverine Reviews

Marvel's Wolverine released for PlayStation 5 today, so I decided to dig up some old magazine coverage of Wolverine's first solo video game. Wolverine is certainly one of the most recognizable Marvel characters today, thanks in part to Hugh Jackman's portrayal of the popular mutant on the big screen in many X-Men movies, as well as the third Deadpool film. The clawed mutant debuted in a 1974 issue of The Incredible Hulk where he battled the green goliath, and he later joined the X-Men in 1975. In 1989 the Uncanny X-Men received its first two games, one a computer game from Paragon Software, and the other a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game from LJN. In the very poorly reviewed NES game, players could select from six heroes, including Wolverine, and battle enemies from an overhead viewpoint. LJN then gave Wolverine his own title in October 1991, a side-scrolling platform game developed by Software Creations. Wolverine faired better than The Uncanny X-Men, and is known for being difficult, which is common among retro platformers.

I scanned reviews from the November 1991 issues of GamePro and Video Games & Computer Entertainment (VG&CE). The GamePro review shares a page with Koei's L'Empereur, so there is a bonus review to read of a completely different type of game. VG&CE's reviews tend to run across multiple pages as they are printed one after another throughout one big column. Just before the Wolverine review, you can see the end of a review for the Sega Genesis game Raiden Trad from Bignet USA. I also moved the end of the Wolverine review from its second page to have the whole review in one image. Something I noticed is that both magazines list the game's MSRP, but both have a slightly different price: $44.95 vs. $47.95.