I grab the controller, settle onto the couch, and suddenly I'm part of the Marvel universe. That's exactly what the ads promised when Ultimate Marvel Quiz Quest landed on Mega Drive in 2023. Reality turned out a bit different.

It's a quiz game you'd probably download into a Mega Drive emulator if you happened to remember Marvel exists. You work through a series of questions about superheroes, films, series, and comics. You glance at a picture or read a question and pick from four options. A point for the right answer, mess up and you go back. The game takes you through several categories and at the end you see your score.

The controls are simple — cursor, button, done. Correct. Except that's where the problem starts. The questions are largely generic, as if someone just dumped content from some online quiz without filtering it. When I got to the sixth category, I realized they were asking about things a regular fan knows, but at the same time they're completely bland — like "What's the name of Spider-Man's uncle?" No tension, no wit, nothing that grabs you by the throat.

The graphics on Mega Drive are what they are — sprite portraits of heroes, simple menus, nothing bombastic. The sound is minimal, the occasional beep when you answer correctly. On a nineties monitor it might've passed, but today you can see it's simply a newer hack with no soul for a system that deserves more than this.

Why remember it at all? Because it represents an era when the emulation community was copying older concepts onto retro hardware without any deeper reflection. A Marvel fan won't find anything here they can't enjoy just as well on their phone. And a classic games player would rather grab something with action than a trivia show.

Today you can try it in your browser through an emulator, spend about fifteen minutes in it, wait for the questions to end, and go back to truly great quizzes that actually knew how to pull players in. This one doesn't.