I don’t claim that I have prophetic visions every day, or that these visions have significant meaning. However, this time I came very close. I have been putting off playing the newest comic book inspired video game, mainly because I thought it was going to be bad.

Once I finally sat down with “X-Men Legends II,” I realized that I could start a career as a television psychic. However, my ability to foresee that “X-Men Legends II” was going to fall short of most expectations did not take much talent.

The game shows a lot of its flaws early on. The game’s story has the righteous X-Men teaming up with their archenemies, the Brotherhood, to defeat an even bigger enemy, Apocalypse. The tension in this game is even suitable for a six-year-old to comprehend. The largest difficulty is when the two loosely allied groups have trouble working together, but somehow in the end, they pull it off by temporarily putting aside their differences.

I sincerely hope that someone lost his job for brainstorming up this gem of a story. Still, I understand that this corny plot is not the focus of the game. Most of the game consisted of poor graphics, long and numerous load screens and over-simplified game play.

I will start my gripes with the graphics. The game begins with an amazing movie quality clip that displays the most notable characters strutting all their best mutant powers. Sadly, movie quality clips are the minority in this game.

Most of the time “X-Men II” features some of the worst graphics that I have recently seen. They are too small and are poorly featured on the screen. The overhead camera angle adds to the problem by failing to fit all the action on the screen. On the occasion when the action-filled battles actually take place on the screen, most of the motion is simplistic and repeated way too often.

Also, “X-Men II” takes every opportunity to squeeze in a load screen. The game is constantly pausing to enter and exit almost every menu in the game. Most of the game’s advanced features are reached through a pop-up menu that seemingly takes forever to load. Fortunately, the wait time is shorter for the Xbox.

Finally, the game play of “X-Men II” is repetitive and simple. The most promising features of the game end up being useless. Sure, you can play as fifteen separate X-Men characters, but there is little need to do so. Switching between characters requires wasting more time replaying levels to build up their strength and special abilities. Generally, this is unnecessary.

Similarly, all of the superheroes can be customized. Yet, doing so has little impact on the game. “X-Men II” comes with all the best settings automatically assigned to each character. It sucks the fun of personalizing the numerous characters completely out of the game.

In the end, I have trouble saying anything good about this game. It comes with a lot of drawbacks and all of the high points of “X-Men II” could have been better. Even if you are a huge fan of the X-Men, this game still may not be for you.

Just because I had a funny feeling about this game before I played it doesn’t mean I am biased against it. I wasted enough time on “X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse” that I would hope that it turned out to be a great game. However, I will not go into denial about this lackluster game simply to justify my misspent weekend.

Bill Hanley is a senior in LAS. His column appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached at [email protected].