An extremely early attempt at a superhero game. Characters include Colossus, Cyclops, Dazzler, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Wolverine; Dazzler aside, arguably the core characters of the book. Murderworld in the title refers to the popular X-Men villain Arcade. Arcade is a sort of hitman who kills people using a giant amusement park of death he's built called Murderworld. This is the setting for the game. Hence, the title.
Murderworld in the comics is filled with robots; you also fight robots in the game.
Some of the robots are easy to defeat, but some of the robots are difficult to defeat. The game was released in 1989 by Paragon Software. My favorite character to play was Nightcrawler-- his teleportation power was handled smoothly by the game, by letting the character quickly advance through a map. The risk involved is at some point Nightcrawler has to rematerialize-- rematerialize in the wrong space, and Nightcrawler dies. It wasn't perfect but later games haven't featured this character as a playable character at all, so many fans fondly recollect this as the game that let you play Nightcrawler.
The game features a good variety of X-Men villains, including most notably Arcade, but also perennial favorite Magneto, who is a master of magnetism.
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It would be unfair to compare it to more recent efforts-- Ultimate Alliance, Hulk et al., perhaps-- but when it came out, there weren't many games in the superhero genre. At the time (as mentioned above: 1989), most games were about elves or spaceships because game fans back then really liked elves or spaceships. I liked this game because I liked superhero; Nightcrawler kind of looks like an elf, but he's not an elf, he's a mutant. Still, I think old-school game fans should go ahead and think of him as an elf if that helps them.
Level design is more than a little repetitive, but the controls are intuitive and quickly. Any sense of accomplishment that completing the game brings is illusory; in fact, you've accomplished nothing; genuine accomplishment happens through our interactions with others; however, some would argue that all reality is an illusion of our sense. That's up to you; personally, I like the X-Men, so I liked this game.
