X-Men (PS3)
When I was young, there was an arcade called Border Town attached to a Taco Bell, and for as long as my brother and I could get away with it, we’d ask to have our birthdays held there almost exclusively to play one single game they had on offer: X-Men. For years, this Konami beat-em-up was only playable on an arcade cabinet, but for a brief window of time before licenses expired, an incredibly faithful port of the title was made to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, allowing me to finally revisit a childhood game that I hadn’t seen in years.
X-Men, despite the simple name, is based on the pilot episode of a failed cartoon called X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men, in so much as that it determines which mutants from the famous superhero team are playable and present as characters in the narrative. There are six characters to choose from: Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Storm, Cyclops, and the dead giveaway that this game’s origins were somewhat odd, the less famous mutant Dazzler. After you picked your mutant of choice, you’ll find yourself in a fairly straightforward brawler, your characters walking through a level with a full plane of vertical and horizontal movement and fighting off anyone who gets in their way. Your skills are fairly limited and are mostly assigned to the same button. Every character has a basic punch combo, aerial attacks, a throw that activates if you’re close enough to an enemy, and you can attack enemies while they are down to finish them off. Variation between the characters is minimal when it comes to these moves, and while you can certainly identify a few differences in attack reach and animation between them, it’s not likely to influence your pick. Besides preferring a character for visual or personality reasons, the main factor to consider when picking your mutant is their mutant power. Every character comes with a skill they can activate that serves as a sort of super move, but it’s not very well balanced across the roster. Colossus dominates with an explosive burst, that doesn’t really match his comic book power of “turning into metal” but that’s hard to make into an attack so instead he gets something that cover a huge amount of screen real estate. Dazzler throws down a blast that covers a fairly good area as well, while Storm’s tornado and Wolverine’s energy claw slash do a lot in knocking away enemies in front of them. Nightcrawler’s power is a bit underwhelming comparatively, the mutant teleporting around and maybe knocking into a few enemies, and Cyclops is the worst off with a laser blast that needs to hit to detonate and the explosion after is fairly small. For the most part, mutant powers are a great way to make some room if you’re getting ganged up on or need to wipe out a pack of strong foes, but Cyclops and Nightcrawler drew the short stick for certain.
Luckily, this brawler has co-op options, and that is definitely where a lot of the love for this game comes from. Depending on the arcade cabinet or by using online play on the console ports, you can get a person playing each character or at least up to four of them, and it improves the game in more ways than one to do so. Playing on your own, the enemies the game throws at you come in fairly manageable clusters, but add another player and the screen is packed with enemies all trying to kill you. Surprisingly, this is the preferred way to play, because even in heavy numbers, the enemies behave in a pretty fair manner, never too many attacking at one time. You can get ganged up on or locked in a corner, but that’s why a good mutant power helps, and worst case is you get creamed for a bit and then jump away or make some room while the game pulls back to let you recover. The basic enemy types usually require getting in close to damage you, and the ones that can attack from range often carry big bazookas or some other indicator they’ll be using projectiles and even then they do so rarely. There are some exceptions to that rule, like hundreds of copies of the Bonebreaker mutant who mostly use their machine guns to shoot up into the air instead of at you, and there are many Sentinel robots in the game that make up the bulk of enemy forces, so when they toss in color changes who can fire their fists at you, you’ll be surprised once and never again. If an enemy looks different they usually have some skill to set them apart from the others, usually just a singular attack that you have to account for, and once again we see that X-Men is a bit simplistic upon scrutiny. A few area hazards exist that you shouldn’t ever fall for like pits and electrified tiles, so you would hope the difficulty would ramp up when it’s time to fight the bosses.
Except that doesn’t seem to be the case. When the screen is packed with enemies you have to hit hard and fast to clear them to avoid damage and get to targets who have projectiles or special attacks. Bosses, though, are almost always fought on their own, meaning you can take your time, bait out their attacks, and use your mutant powers quite freely. Mutant powers draw on health or special orbs you gain during play, and it’s not a bad tactic to just hold onto them and launch them all at the boss to whittle them down quickly. Even if you didn’t do that, many bosses like to stand around, leaving themselves open for a sequence of attacks that, if you end at the right time and move, come with no risk of retaliation. With even two players the boss’s health can be easily run down by alternating and playing extremely safe, but when you do get the chance to see these bosses with other enemies, they show that they aren’t bad ideas necessarily, they just need some back-up to be a threat or else the attention is too much for them to deal with.
A lot of the issues with repetition, simple enemies, and limited attack options are smoothed over with just how good the presentation of the game is, but not for the reasons the creators likely intended. It’s cool to see the X-Men and some of their famous villains in a beat-em-up with good sprite design, but so much of the story, voice lines, and even music are incredibly campy and are the best kind of cheesy. The story is about the evil mutant Magneto somehow gaining control of hundreds upon hundreds of robot Sentinels and launching an attack, and he has an odd smattering of X-Men villains helping him. The scenes that present this info often have goofy looking art and cheesy dialogue though, making the game unintentionally funny and all the better for it. The usually serious villain Magneto proclaims he is the “Master of Magnet!”, calls you an “X-Chicken!”, and will greet the X-Men by saying “Welcome to Die!” The Blob, a bulky boss character, will call out “Nothing moves the Blob!” right before you immediately knock him down with your first attack, and after beating levels, you’ll be treated to lines like “Magneto is in another place” and “Magneto is over there.” On top of all of this, the game has a few songs that integrate someone just saying “X-Men” into them and remixing the word around to make some charmingly odd beats. I wouldn’t say it’s ever enough to mask the simplicity of the gameplay design, but X-Men’s oddball presentation makes for a decent reward for beating waves of enemies or a simple boss.
So far, everything said about the game has been about this title in general, but when looking at the console ports, you find a few things really good and a few failings. It is, of course, incredibly faithful to the arcade version, and the game even offers you your choice of difficulties, “cabinet size” which might as well mean screen size, and whether you want to play the U.S. or Japanese version. They are options and options are always nice to have, but it feels like there’s no reason to play something besides the six player cabinet size on Expert with the Japanese ROM. Four player cabinet size will squeeze the image of the playfield into a small box in the center of your screen, so you can open it up with six player to fill the screen instead and show more enemies and level space. The difference between the U.S. and Japanese ROM only comes in displaying Japanese subtitles for scenes always spoken in English and two baffling changes made in porting it from Japan to America. Japan’s version has enemies sometimes drop health and mutant power orb pick ups, but in the U.S. they did not, likely to draw more coins from players. Since using your mutant power can draw on health or those orbs, a player was likely to die more often and spend more money if they didn’t have pick-ups to help them out. The other change goes even further in trying to fleece kids out of more cash, because in Japan, you use your mutant power orbs first before you pull from your health, but it’s the inverse in the United States so that you can only use your orbs once you’re on one sliver of health. This would be more annoying on an arcade cabinet, but the X-Men ports don’t simulate the idea of having credits to play at all. In fact, no matter how you play it, you’ll have infinite continues, meaning that if you felt like it, you could use your mutant power as much as possible, die, and do it all over again, completely negating most of the enjoyment of the game. You have to make yourself actually fight and do something besides die and spam one skill, and Konami didn’t even include an option to simulate playing with limited continues. It’s a bit odd to fault a game for it making sure you can win, but it also forces you to engage a more interesting approach than the most effective one to derive any fun out of it. I won’t fault the game for this in its end rating since I feel you can still play it normally and not feel you have to abuse that tactic because infinite respawns also means you can approach it how you like, but it is something that impacts the port’s enjoyability.
THE VERDICT: X-Men’s cheesy poor translation makes the game charming and its co-op play options make it easy to pick up and play and have a blast, but it’s not exactly an exceptional beat-em-up. Your attack options are limited and enemies don’t push you to do much, but despite the faults in its design, it does capture the basic requirements of a brawler so well it helps hide the simplicity. Character options, explosive powers, and memorable moments help you forget that you spend most of your time hammering one button or unloading mutant powers in tepid boss battles. Taking on hordes of enemies and knocking them down nails the beat-em-up genre’s goal of making the player feel powerful, allowing it to earn a spot in many hearts despite how basic it seems under scrutiny.
And so, I give X-Men for the PlayStation 3…
A GOOD rating. It’s a bit odd to say a game my brother and I both spent multiple birthday parties on just playing as far as tokens would take us is just Good, but it’s unfortunately the honest truth. X-Men is a bit of a brainless brawler but it nails its action and makes the game compelling with visuals both good and cheesy as well as some hilarious audio. I was definitely a big X-Men fan as a kid that also pushed me to be even more interested in it, and while I still love the mutant superhero team, I can see that a lot of what made me marvel at it was peeled away by clearer eyes and the fact that I can play it to the end without worrying about how many tokens are left in my pocket. The Good is well-earned, and I didn’t let the PS3 port undermining some gameplay with its infinite continues knock it down any lower since you’ve basically activated “pocket full of quarters” mode in a sense, a problem any arcade game could face if it lets you continue exactly where you left off. Still, even an option to have that risk would make the port more interesting, and some more attack variety would help the brawler itself be as good as my nostalgic tale likely made it seem like it would be.
X-Men will always hold a huge spot in my heart for defining part of my childhood, and while its undeniably short and plain at parts, it’s got enough to make it a fun revisit so you can laugh at the bad translation, smash some simple baddies, and never pick Cyclops.