X-Men Arcade Review: "RrrooooraaaaaahhhhhH!"

If you don't know by now, Konami has finally released the X-MEN arcade game for Xbox Live and Playstation Network. The game is a faithful but updated port of the original arcade. It's a six player beat 'em up(which also allows you to dial down the player count to four) which supports two roms, Japan and USA (One has power-ups through out the level, the other one doesn't respectively). And just to let you know, if the style and choice of characters befuddle you, the arcade is based on the pilot X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men. It's a 1989 pilot that didn't take off and was revamped to the 1990s X-Men we all know and love. If you want to sample a bit of the Pryde:



Now, on to the review!

As mentioned before, this game originally came out in 1992. My first experience with the game was purely a visual one. I was on vacation in Florida, probably in Disney world, I saw the cabinet and was like "Holy crap, that looks cool...too bad I have no money to actually play it." Fast foward almost ten years later, I have it on my Xbox. When I first played this game, I kind of got that same reaction. Even though the game is 18 years old, a lot of the art still stands up. It's very cool to pick your X-Men (Cyclops, Wolverine, Colossus, Storm, Dazzler and NightCrawler). Intially when you play the game, it feels solid. You have you standard attack button, jump and special move, and it's pretty fun kicking ass as your favorite/least favroite X-Man but the more you play, the more you realize that to truly apperciate this game, you must have played in the arcades during its prime. This is not to say the game is not good, but it's repeative in such way that makes the experience dull once you get over the nice grpahics and presentation. And the update doesn't do the game any favors since it removes the arcade experience.



Get used to seeing this...alot

The game supports up to six players online for both the XBL and PSN versions, but the Xbox 360 versions only supports up to 4 players locally, while PlayStation supports up to 6. Online options include Quick match, Custom match, and Create match. Quick match drops you into any random game, Custom match allows you to search for a game based specfic parameters of your choosing and Create Match enables you to start your own game as other players join you. From my personal experince, the online gaming was okay. Some times the session would be flawless, other times there's lag and slowdown, but I assume it mostly has to do with the host of the game. And be prepared to get used to people dropping in and out, while not a major issue for some, it can get annoying to have a six-player match widdle down to two-players then four, then three, etc. as I have experienced.

Going back to what I said about taking the game out of the arcade element where you needed to drop coins to continue the game, because this part of the game is out there are no consequences for playing recklessly. By reckless I mean spamming the mutant power button, over and over and over over and over again. I swear that's what all these matches boil down to. You see in the USA rom (default game in North America), anytime you use mutant power it takes away 4 bars from your health. Now this is to indicate that's for special occassions where the baddies are just too much or too strong. Since there are unlimited lives, players just end up using mutant power the entire game, get killed and do it all over again. It gets very annoying and Colossus seems to be everyone's favorite spam character. Get used to hearing "RrrooooraaaaaahhhhhH" a lot from him.What Backbone should have done (Konami's game, but Backbone ported it) is have game which with a set number of lives so that players actual use skill to stay alive instead of relying constantly on their powers.

In the end, for $10, X-Men is not a bad deal but it's a one-trick pony that gets old fast. The ability to play online strengthens its value but the way other players play online will have to turn off your game. This game runs purely off of nostalgia so if you have a warm place in your heart for this game by all means purchase it, for others it's best you wait til there is a discount online.