Retro Saga Part 31: X-Men: The Arcade game for the Arcade, PSN, and Xboxlive review




If you don’t know by last week’s review of X-Men Destiny, Silicon Knights did not impress me. It is possibly the worst game I ever played, but that dubious honor may still go to Xaolin Shodown for the PS2.  I mean, in X-Men Destiny, there is not one single original bone in that game’s body. Once again, the only redeeming factor is Nightcrawler’s design and the two boss fights with Magneto and the Sentinel. However, the rest of the game sucks. It’s graphically ugly, the combat is boring and repetitive, the story is terrible, the characters are bland, and I’m beating this game like Ivan Drago beating Apollo Creed in Rocky 4 to death. I swear, I can’t believe the developers haven’t closed down since they seem to have not gotten the idea of the Canadian Government bailing them out for them to hire new people and new tech to make better games, but no! They are so stupidly stubborn and want X-Men Destiny to sell a million copies. Yeah, that is not going to happen when your game is this low in quality and is possibly the first time ever I gave a game a 1 out of 10. How about we move to a much better and more fun X-Men game? Let’s dive into the always awesome and fun to play X-Men: The Arcade Game! Oh, and to answer your question, I won’t make a joke with the game’s infamous phrase, “welcome to die!” Well, not yet anyway. 

What is the story? Well, Magneto is feeling like being a tyrant and wants to rule the world! It is up to you as the X-Men to stop him. You also have to save the world. There really isn’t any story besides that. What? You expected a grand epic story with huge twists and sad endings? Well, if you thought you would find that here in an arcade game, then you are not on the same wavelength. Just beat up sentinels and beat down on some mutants with some infamously bad dialogue. Let us move on then.

The gameplay is your typical beat em’ up that you see in games like Final Fight and Streets of Rage. You pick from your 6 different X-Men who for a fun fact, were suppose to be the main cast of a canceled pilot episode for an X-Men show made by the guys who did the G.I. Joe cartoon from the 80’s. They pretty much play the same except for their super moves. You go around basically beating the tar out of human-sized sentinels, and from time to time fighting a mutant that works under Magneto. There is a six-player co-op mode where you and 5 other people can play the game at the same time. Each character has their own super move, but that sadly drains you of your life so don’t use it too often. There are multiple difficulties and even a Japanese ROM version of the game where it’s a lot easier than the American version. Why we got the harder version, I will never know. 

Graphically, it is a bit better looking than a lot of 16-bit games and pretty much goes into the 32-bit territory, but they still look nice and give off that warm nostalgic feeling of going into a probably very filthy arcade and playing with 5 random strangers to save the world and beat Magneto. The music is very arcade-like and upbeat, but for me, not very memorable. Since this is based off the canceled X-Men series created by the G.I. Joe cartoon creators, all I can think of is the awesomely stupid theme music that went with the show. There is definitely a lot of warm nostalgia that comes with this game since I didn’t go to arcades that much and I never got to enjoy this. So even though I know this is a very simple arcade game, I still have a blast, and when you are playing with a friend, you can both enjoy the amazingly stupid dialogue.  

So, what could possibly be bad about this game? Well, for one thing, it’s very hard. Yeah, yeah, I know it was meant to gobble up your quarters, but even on the easiest setting, this game was incredibly hard. It also didn’t help that there were special moves that drained your energy. I find that very cheap. I guess they wanted you to be strategic, but this is a freaking simple button masher, there should be no strategy involved. Even the downloadable Simpson’s arcade game only used two dang buttons. I also wish there was more enemy variety since all you really do is fight the same enemies over and over. The final complaint I have is a conflicting opinion about the dialogue. It is delightfully stupid with a lot of grammar errors, like, “I am Magneto! Master of Magnet” or “X-Men, Welcome to Die!” these are incredibly fun to listen to, but it reminds me of Magician Lord in the same way where that dialogue is also incredibly stupid and wrong in so many grammatical ways. 

Overall, this is a blast to play! I mean, you could go out of your way to find a 6-player arcade cabinet and pay who knows how much for it. That would be stupid when you can easily go on Xboxlive or PSN for only 10 dollars. What sounds better? Paying probably over a thousand dollars? Or pay only 10 dollars? You decide! Anyway, I feel like I should cap off this review for next week with another awesome licensed game that was conveniently made by Konami. While I think about this, I’m going to get a donut.

This game gets an 8 out of 10

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