But the best thing about the MSH system was, far and away, the game system itself. It was bloody simple. All percentile dice and a big universal chart. You found the value of your attribute or power or whatever on the chart, rolled percentile dice, and got either a white result (failure), green (minor success), yellow (good success) or red (excellent success). Detail beyond that was basically in the GM's hands.
And attributes weren't just numbers, they were adjectives. A character has an Excellent strength, an Amazing agility, and so on. There was almost no dice-rolling involved in combat; one roll basically summed up your attack. This was sometimes bad; it would be impossible for the Thing's Monstrous strength (with a numeric value of 75) to penetrate the Hulk's Unearthly body armor (value of 100), no matter what he did. But it was much faster, and much simpler, and much more rollicking. Lots of rolling and shouting and going to the next player.
My most memorable MSH game was run over the summer of 1990. I'd just finished my freshman year at BGSU, and most of my friends had just finished their senior years in high school. I was working as a dishwasher at the Perkins restaurant in Edinboro, second shifts, and hating it. Plus, my girlfriend at the time was working a couple hundred miles away, and so I was pretty depressed. I picked up the Flames of the Future MSH adventures, which were, in short, a future setting where superpowered mutants were hounded and hunted to death by the paranoid human majority. The player characters were, of course, superpowered mutants. We set the game in our hometown, and the players all ran themselves, only as superpowered mutants. :-)
Kids, don't use the phrase "superpowered mutants" this often at home; Mr. Kiley is a trained professional.
The games ran practically every night that summer. I didn't get off work most nights before 1am, but we would still get together, mostly out at Mike Baker's parents' place, hiding out on their porch and playing for a few hours before we crashed. Half of the other players worked first shift at the grocery store, the others worked second shift or not at all, so we all took our biological clocks and warped them; we would socialize late at night, sleep either just before or just after gaming, and work during the other shift.
This is not about the game at all. Stop digressing
The players really loved the genre, I think, and the game's systems allowed them to do almost anything in their efforts to escape their dark-future fates. My pat response to the player-request "Can I try to do this?" was "You can try anything," which really was true. And this was very conducive to superheroing, after all, because characters in comics really do try ridiculous stunts and get away with them. All of this combined to make this MSH game one of my favorites of that time, and one of the best roleplaying experiences I ever had with my high school friends.