I honestly never thought I'd play X-Men Arcade again once the coin-operated industry withered and died. Fortunately, despite the fact that Activision currently holds the license for X-Men games, Marvel and Konami have struck a deal that allows me to gather up to five of my friends to stop Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil mutants. In many respects the game is just as fun as it was back in 1992, but there's no doubt the game shows its age and considerable eccentricity.
Konami and developer Backbone Entertainment have painstakingly recreated the six-player brawler, and in doing so they have ported one of the best games of the genre. But, typical of that genre back then, there are considerable problems. The game is incredibly simple, repetitive and it suffers from the most ridiculous dialogue and storyline you could possibly imagine. And yet it works. It's simply a blast to play with friends. As kids we loved challenging Magneto's army of Sentinels with strangers in a packed arcade.
Konami and developer Backbone Entertainment have painstakingly recreated the six-player brawler, and in doing so they have ported one of the best games of the genre. But, typical of that genre back then, there are considerable problems. The game is incredibly simple, repetitive and it suffers from the most ridiculous dialogue and storyline you could possibly imagine. And yet it works. It's simply a blast to play with friends. As kids we loved challenging Magneto's army of Sentinels with strangers in a packed arcade.
In every way, this is a straight port of the original experience. You play as one of six X-Men, punching and kicking your way through eight or so levels, fighting endless waves of a rainbow battalion of Sentinels and… odd alligator people. The story is laughable, not only because of its shallow nature (save your friends and the world) but because it makes little sense. In one scene a giant Sentinel unleashes a horde of enemies upon you… and 10 minutes later you hitch a ride on it to challenge Magneto on Asteroid M. The reason? There isn't one - just go along for the ride. As a quarter-munching arcade game none of this mattered much, but in the solitude of your own home, you're going to notice. It's probably because I still love the X-Men and have such a fond nostalgia for the game, but I found all of the ridiculousness amusing. Your mileage may vary.
The dialogue in X-Men Arcade deserves a special mention as it is amongst the worst (and therefore best) in the industry. No doubt you're all aware of the "All your base are belong to us" case of terrible translation from Zero Wing. X-Men carries some of its own gems, including "I am Magneto, Master of Magnet." And I hope you love repetitive music, because you're going to get a ton of it – when you can hear it over the primal shouts of Colossus as well as characters yelling out their names every time they die and restart in the level.
By any modern production standard, X-Men Arcade is ludicrous. That was also true back in the '90s, but many of us were too young to notice. But knowing this game is mostly a social affair, Konami has added full online support for both XBLA and PSN. In the case of XBLA, recruiting online players is the only way you can reach a full six player roster since the Xbox 360 only supports four controller connections. PSN players don't have the worry about that restriction, as the system is more than capable of allowing six local participants.
Online play is a breeze, thanks to several options for players. A Quick Match will jump you into the first game the system finds. With Custom Match you can search for particular settings such as difficulty, location and even the version of the game (more on that below). You can also host public or private games with the Create Match option and even disable voice chat to prevent pesky commentators. Konami also included leaderboards which can track a number of statistics, ranking players by points, which can be filtered by a number of criteria.
Perhaps the weakest element of X-Men Arcade isn't quite Konami's fault. As part of the deal with Marvel, no alterations could be made to the original code outside of online functionality. There are no added characters, no new enemies, no redone graphics… this is the exact same game, one that will likely only take you about 30 minutes to complete. To be fair, Konami did its best to add in a few perks for fans. One is the ability to switch between the Japanese and USA versions of the game. The Japan version of X-Men is actually easier. Health and Mutant Power items are dropped by enemies, and in the Japanese version your mutant powers use the "Power tokens" first and health later. For some inexplicable reason the USA version does the reverse. There are also a few levels of difficulty, which become necessary if you want a challenge when you're sporting a full co-op mutant roster.
