Review

X-Men: The Arcade Game

I can remember the first time I played a beat em up (or brawler) in an arcade. My dad took me to a local arcade one day to check out some of the new machines. With several cabinets featuring a nice mix of genres, the one game that caught my eye was Final Fight. I had loved playing Double Dragon on the NES so Final Fight was right up my alley. Even though Double Dragon is one of my favorite series, I didn’t get to play it in the arcade till much later. However, when it came to the Final Fight series, I was introduced the right way. Plus, it featured two player co-op were as DD was only one player at home. My dad and I spent a lot of money putting fist to chin, with me constantly running to the coin machine whenever we saw the continue screen showcasing our characters tide to ticking time bombs. After that day, for years I sought out beat em ups anytime I was in an arcade. I would walk past the Street Fighters and Daytona USA’s for games like Golden Axe, The Simpsons, Double Dragon, Warriors of Fate, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  After all that time, I still love a good beat ’em up. So when Konami announced X-men Arcade was coming to Xbox Live I jumped at the chance to review the classic. After upgrading (and sticking two monitors together) from a four player beat ’em up to six, X-men would easily become one of the best this genre had to offer. After all that time, is it still one of the best? Well, that depends on who you talk to.

X-men Arcade is a great retro addition to Xbox Live and PSN. Just like in the arcades of old, gamers are able to battle Magneto and his minions with friends locally or online. Ironically, it seems that Magneto is using the mutant hunting machines known as sentinels to wreak havoc around the globe. Gamers get to choose from six classic X-men: Wolvorine, Cyclops, Strom, Colossus, Dazzler, and Knight Crawler round out the list of selectable characters. Each X-men plays the same with standard attack and jump buttons. Pressing the “attack” button causes your character to melee attack and sometimes throw nearby enemies. Pressing attack with the jump button causes them to do a powerful screen clearing move. The X-men have slight differences when it comes to this special attack (Storm creates a tornado and Cyclops uses his Eye Beam) but other than that they are just skins for you to wrap your character in. Once the carnage begins, you wont care about their differences as you’ll be to busy bashing baddies with five other gamers. That’s right, X-men Arcade has been released with both the four player standard version and the six player dual monitor version. This means that you and three friends can play locally or you and five friends can play online (PS3 gamers can have six players on and offline). Either way, you’re bound to have fun battling waves of enemies and classic bosses like the Blob and Juggernaut. Again, this is classic beat ‘em up goodness that any old school gamer can enjoy.

The only thing that puts a damper on the fun is the inclusion of infinite continues. Most beat em ups were short in length as they were designed to be beaten in one sitting. What made them challenging was the fact that players were given a set number of continues. Once they were all used up, it was game over. On top of that, any special moves that were used to clear a large number of enemies usually took some of the players life gauge. Meaning that spamming supers resulted in a quick death. With X-men Arcade’s infinite continues, there is nothing keeping you from abusing each mutant’s special ability. This makes the rather short campaign a cakewalk as all of the quarter pumping difficulty has been reduced to nothing. If anything Konami should have given gamers a choice in the number of continues they could use. This would’ve allowed the gamers who wanted a challenge something to look forward to, while at the same time making the game easier for newcomers.

As it stands, X-men Arcade will only appeal to people who grow up playing these types of games. It’s great to bash enemies with friends online. However, with the campaign being stripped of its difficulty, gamers can beat the game in under twenty minuets (that’s even an Achievement). There is no leveling system, redeeming story, unlockables, or any of the replay adding features that we’ve become accustomed to. The only thing that justifies its existence to newcomers would be the inclusion of six player online co-op. We all know that the great beat ‘em up Scott Pilgrim would have been even better with online capabilities. For the X-men, it’s the only thing keeping them alive.