Fighting games are really just an excuse for two characters to get together and beat the pulp out of each other. All you need is a pretext to explain why the characters want to beat each other unconscious. Take X-Men, for example… Er… well, this game doesn’t really have much of a story. All that I could tell is that you take control of one of the X-Men or one of their enemies and have to defeat Magneto and stop his crazy ‘kill all of the non-mutants’ scheme. Now, why you have to fight the other mutants before you get to fight Magneto, I don’t know. Maybe you can think of them as his guardians or something. In fact, I’m sure if you think about it long enough, you can rationalize it somehow in some way that makes sense. I don’t have that kind of time.
I don’t pretend to know much about the X-Men universe outside of what I saw in the animated series, I never really was that into comics or anything, so I don’t really know that much about the characters or their motivations. But what I do know is that this was a pretty good game. It plays a lot like the Street Fighter game, but a lot more cartoony. The moves are a lot more exaggerated, and with the mutants’ superhuman abilities, the action goes way over the top.
But, I didn’t really spend a lot of time with this game. Mostly because it was in my local arcade for about three days. That particular arcade had a ridiculously high turnover rate for games for some reason. The downside to that is that I didn’t get very good at many games, because I didn’t get to spend time with them, but the upside is that I got to play lots of really mediocre games…
Um… Is that really an upside?