Justice League Taskforce

Justice League Task Force is without a doubt a product of its time. You blow on the cartridge, put it into the slot, slide the power button and you're immediately transported back to the mid 90's. Sure it was a great time in general: pre 9/11, economic prosperity, new weekly episodes of both Full House and Family Matters, the apex of the Atlanta Braves dynasty. But for the comic book industry it was actually the dark ages.

The 90's will always be marred by the rise of the uber masculine superhero as first envisioned by Image Comics (google Rob Liefeld) and later adapted by both of the big two. Whereas the 80's signaled a revolution towards the anti hero, towards imperfect, often imbalanced heroes the 90's gave us loads of steroids, bad hair and unparalleled machismo. It wasn't pretty.

Not to say that JLA Taskforce isnt pretty: for a mid 90's game the character design is nice, with colorful, beefy sprites that take up a significant amount of TV real estate, nice background stages and decent music the game could justifiable be found at your local KMart for thirty bucks.

Where it falls apart is in the gameplay department. Like all fighting games of the era it tries to be Street Fighter but the action is too choppy and random to merit such a comparison. The six available characters (and three bosses) all play the same, they all (except one) have a charging attack and projectiles which can all be used with the hadoken command. Boring. Street Fighter tried to give us different fighting styles, JLA Taskforce takes two of those styles and applies them to known superheroes and calls it a game.

And a very difficult game at that! n00bs will soon be changing the difficulty setting when they discover that even the first character in the story is impossible to beat on medium. All of these characters fight cheap: you jump they throw you a projectile, you throw a projectile they jump kick you, before you realize it your life meter is flashing and you're about to die.

But lets get back to the available characters, shit lets break them down one by one:

Superman: the mere thought that anybody can challenge a guy that flies, has laser vision and is stronger then hell is laughable but I guess he's fighting fair here.

Batman: I fucking love Batman.

The Flash: not cool hat Flash but rather spandex muscles 90's Flash. Oh by the way Joe Higashi called he wants his tornado attack back.

Wonder Woman: because you need to have a woman in here. (Cheetah is also in it as a boss).

Aquaman: D'you wanna get high Aquaman???

Green Arrow: Wait Green Arrow is in this? holy fuck talk about your unlikely inclusions! yes I knew he was in it, yes this is the reason why I bought this game. Any more questions?

Like I said the stages are very easy on the eyes, from the Daily Planet globe to Aquaman's underwater Aquatic Justice center, even Batman's Gotham is as dark and pretentious as he is. By the way Green Arrow fights in the forest. Really? the forest? it's like the developers had never heard of Green Arrow but they figured since he looks like Robin Hood then he must be Robin Hood.

Oh shit, how about the story? its pretty easy to follow: Darkseid has declared war on earth (this is literally what it says) and its up to the JLA to fuck him up. Obviously the JLA is up to it and they go about doing it by....fighting against each other? try to figure that one out.

All in all a very interesting game that might be incredibly frustrating but is cool nonetheless. A DC fighting game is by definition kinda fun, especially since it wouldn't happen again until they struck a deal with Mortal Kombat to try to make both franchises relevant again.