X-Men Arcade - Xbox Live Arcade

Sit down and let me tell you the story of how I came to own X-Men Arcade for XBL. I remember playing X-Men Arcade as a kid so when I heard that it was going to be released on XBL I was rather excited. Not wanting to jump right in and buy it I decided to pick up the demo and play it. So I started playing the demo, it wasn't really as fun as I remember, but I was somewhat enjoying myself. That's when I got an achievement. Actually a pop up said that if I owned the game I would have gotten an achievement. It also gave me the option of buying the game by pressing A. Well I was jumping around doing kicks at the time that the message popped up... pressing A. So it took me directly to the buy page. You have two options, confirm download or cancel. I'm not sure if you can cycle through back to the top or if I just thought I hit down and didn't, but either way I ended up hitting confirm download instead of cancel.

I now owned X-Men Arcade. Oh boy.

Now I won't say that it wasn't my fault, but it seemed just a little to easy to buy the game. Whatever, I owned it now. Not much I could do about it. So I decided to put my best foot forward, not care, and just play the game.

And that's exactly what I did. I sat down and played the game. It took me twenty-seven minutes to beat it. Twenty-seven minutes from start to finish. Oh well, there was always the multiplayer.

X-Men Arcade Multiplayer allows you to play the single player game with up to six different players. Which is interesting... except that in the next hour I beat the game another three times. In less than an hour and a half I had beat the game four times.

Over the next couple days I played the multi a few more times, beating the game another five or six times. It was kind of fun just to spend twenty minutes or so beating the game, but it's not like I'm going to be playing it a ton more over the next weeks or months. It's mostly just served as a twenty minute distraction.

Here's my problem. This game costs 800 MS points, that's $10 in real life money. That's quite a lot of money for a game that can be beaten in less than a half hour on the hardest setting. Even with the multiplayer this game is worth more along the lines of 400 MS points. Also the multiplayer is kind of borked. You get six players in a game and I guarantee you're going to get some slow down. In some places it becomes downright unplayable.

This game isn't at all difficult either. You're playing the X-Men Arcade game, but with unlimited quarters. Sure you can die, but the game never ends. Even on the hardest difficulty setting this game is incredibly easy. There's almost no challenge.

So should you buy it? I would say no unless there's certain conditions: On sale or 400 MS points? Sure, it's worth $5. Huge X-Men fan? Might be worth it for you. Have massive nostalgia for X-Men Arcade? Probably worth the $10. Overall though it's just not a good enough game to be worth $10.

Squid.