How did this pass Nintendo's standards ?
STORY: It follows the same as the X-Men, Professor Xavier and the X-Men must stop Magneto from destroying humanity, it's redundant but stays true to the source material.
GRAPHICS: The title screen looks good with the X-Men on it, but when you get into the game, dear lord is it a mess. The stages are top down and the way all the stages are just completely mangled with poor detail makes it impossible to figure out what's an obstacle and what's not. The X-Men look terrible, with each of them looking barely like the selection screen for them and as for the enemies, I don't know what to say, they look awful and nothing like the enemies from the comics.
SOUND: The music is not to bad but it can get on your nerves with how quickly it loops and the sounds of the enemies blowing up is pretty good with explosions for deaths.
CONTROLS: On the selection screen for the X-Men it is very sensitive and loose, the in-game controls however are pretty decent and reliable enough for you to beat the stages, if you can even handle the stages.
GAMEPLAY: Here's the other game's problem, you have 4 stages to beat and then a final level that can be unlocked only by beating the other stages, sounds simple, no it isn't. You have to have another player with you to play the game or the CPU takes control of player two, and the computer is useless since it just runs in circles and either shoots or push. Speaking of shooting, 3 of your X-Men can shoot and the other 3 push their enemies to death. The gameplay is just revolting with just running around looking for the boss (which I could never get to one) and is a big ugly mutilated mess of a maze and from what I heard the only way to get to the last level is a secret code, making the gameplay more frustrating and overall a really bad game.
CONCLUSION: This game is jut disappointing and one of the worst games for the NES as well as a big skid mark on Nintendo's seal of quality, just pass this game up and get a better NES game like Super Mario Bros. 3