The Old Arcade, Blew Every Dollar We Ever Made

One of the harsh realities of growing older is that some of the things you remember so fondly when you were younger may not be as great as you remember.  Some things just don't age well.  For example, have you ever seen an episode of the original GI Joe cartoon recently?  Man is that animation choppy and the plot is just stupid and physics just don't exist.  Someone can fire a missile at an airplane sitting on the ground and the pilot has enough time to open the canopy, climb out of the airplane, and run to a safe distance before the plane explodes.   Riiiiight.  Unfortunately, the same concept holds true for video games.  I found out this harsh reality recently when I downloaded X-Men: The Arcade Game on Xbox Live.

To say that this game was my favorite arcade game is an understatement.  When I was a teenager my best friend and I would pour over $20 in quarters into this game and play it until we beat it every single summer.  It was the video game that got me into comic books and I've been an X-Men fan ever since.  Arcades have basically disappeared and this game disappeared along with them.  I literally haven't played this game in over 15 years.  That is until, it was finally released this week on Xbox Live.

The game is simple enough.  You play as one of six X-Men characters and you have to battle the forces of Magneto through various levels beating up an army of bad guys and various boss villains until you defeat Magneto himself and save the day.  The cool part of the arcade game was that you could play along side 5 other people at once.  The game was huge and was the original widescreen game.  They pulled off the widescreen the old school way of putting two tv screens beside each other.

In the 15 years since I played this game, my fondness of it grew and grew.  I remember thinking this game was an epic adventure that took dedication to finish.  It was the game of ultimate teamwork where you played along side 5 strangers and only together could you defeat Magneto.  I thought it was a genre defining video game and couldn't figure out why they never released it to a console before today.

Then I downloaded the game...

My first sign of concern was during the download process.  I downloaded a pinball game earlier this week and it took over 300 megs of memory.  X-Men took only 42 megs.  Uh oh.

The graphics couldn't look worse.  Every character looks like they had too much fiber for breakfast.  And the story doesn't make any sense.  In today's comic books, Magneto and Prof X have buried the hatchet and are best friends.  The White Queen (Magneto's woman in the game) is now sleeping with Cyclops and is the X-Men's #2 in command.  And half of the other bad guys died in the comics over 5 years ago.  So why are we all fighting again?

Oh and this epic game of teamwork couldn't be more repetitive.  Press the X button to attack, repeat.  That's the game.  It gets pretty old very quickly.  And speaking of quickly, this epic adventure of dedication was beaten this afternoon in 27 minutes.

It was a nice walk down memory lane, but sometimes some things should stay fond memories.  I'll probably go back and play it again and just laugh at how silly the whole game has become.  Just because I was brought up in the old school, doesn't mean I don't appreciate how good the new school is.  I truly believe that we are in the golden age of video games and I challenge anyone to tell me that the games that they played 10 years ago are any way better than the ones out now.   Its ok to appreciate the memories of the old games, but lets play the new games instead and leave the old games in the past.

Until next time,

 -The 30 Year-old Gamer