I subscribed to my first comic book series when I was 15. That comic: X-Men. I grew up on the Fox Kids animated series but felt that Wolverine, carefully designed to be the coolest character in the world, had been nerfed for Saturday morning audiences. The guy has knives that shoot out of his fist! How is he not chopping people like Omega Red in half? Fist knives!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: The Game (I honestly don't know if the actual title has two colons, but it looks hilarious to me) does all the horribly graphic and violent things I've always wanted to see Wolvie do but the mainstream media wouldn't give me. And it does it very well.

Let me state first of all that I did not care for the film this game is based on. It's rare that a movie tie-in video game outshines its box office brethren, but this is one of those cases. The game version makes the story more interesting by going back and forth from present day Logan to flashbacks of his final mission with Weapon X. The game also finds ways to weave in extras like Sentinels, the shape-shifter Mystique, as well as setting up Nightcrawler's lineage for nerds like me who are in the know when it comes to the Marvel universe. Much like the movie, though, the story just serves to set up the next action sequence. That's not so great in a movie, but in a game like this, that's all you can really ask for.

I found that X-Men Origins blends aspects of Bioshock, RPGs and a heaping helping of God of War. There may be some who feel X-Men Origins is a blatant rip-off of the Sony insta-classic, but I feel Origins actually embodies the same spirit of God of War and does its best to stay original and entertaining. The combat is fluid and the combos you can pull off are very impressive for a licensed game. You can use the environment in interesting and often gory ways and also are pulled into button-timed mini-scenes to do things like rip a pilot out of a flying helicopter or force an enemy soldier to shoot himself with his own gun.

Which brings me to my warning. Parents of children under the age of 17: DON'T BUY YOUR KID THIS GAME! Not unless you think he or she (but seriously, is this game even aimed at anyone with two X chromosomes?) is ready to deal with extremely graphic violence. The flick is rated PG-13, but the game would receive nothing less than a hard R. The good people at GameStop won't sell your underage kid M-rated games. This is on you, moms and dads.

Wolverine is not a perfect game, but it never stops being entertaining and five hours in, I was still finding new ways to kill baddies. I can also assure that once you unlock them, there's nothing cooler than playing as Wolverine in his classic brown and yellow costume.

◗ Beef E. Thompson: beefyness@gmail.com