the legendary x-men

I got together with some very good friends on the weekend to catch up with each other and play video games. Collectively we decided that the centerpiece of our evening with an XBox would be X-Men Legends, allowing us to avoid the embarassing multiplayer gameplay of old standbys Hunter: The Reckoning and the infinite brown-ness of Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes. Halo is never considered because my friends know well enough that in order for me to play multiplayer FPS it must involve several computers.

The initial assessment of Legends' combat is still correct: aside from removing a group of adversaries from around a teammate with your mutant power, the game requires fists to be flying through the air at all times. Though where I'm beginning to see the game's long lasting appeal is in the development of the roster of characters - there really is a time and place for all of them. Levelling characters and selecting new abilities becomes a group activity, and not nearly as invasive as I would have thought. Though despite my Iceman and Juan's Storm being elemental magic users, we always found ourselves on the front lines taking bullets for Wolverine and Cyclops. Yes, Wolverine, with the healing factor. Cyclops, for some reason, found pleasure in picking up explosive cannisters and throwing them into groups of people (often our own ranks). This is not how you win the game.

Even with four players, the game gets extremely difficult, and will almost always punish you for trying to plow through its lengthy missions. I may have been a bit harsh in saying that there's no strategy; on the contrary, Legends makes you take the same approach as you would in games like Diablo or RTS titles. Lead smaller, manageable groups of the enemy into a controllable environment where they can be dealt with efficiently. The lack of healing potions was a scenario that was completely avoidable; we just couldn't seem to convince someone that the "heal" button need only be pressed once to deliver a potion.

Although I had already experienced multiplay during my review, it was only with two players, which required the control of two characters per player. With everyone in control of their own character, it convinced me of two things: firstly, that X-Men Legends is actually a very well rounded multiplayer experience, and secondly, it shared more in common with Konami's X-Men arcade game than I first realized.

I doubt that Raven used Konami's X-Men as a stencil, but I find it odd that the first boss that you encounter in both games is Pyro. Furthermore, in Legends there is a throwback to 70s era X-Men in a flashback mission where they do battle with Sentinels on the streets of New York, which is almost word for word the first level of the arcade game. It brought back a lot of fond memories of sitting on a wobbly stool in Canada's Wonderland's Crystal Palace, playing through the game with complete strangers and getting into arguments over who got to be Wolverine. Reminiscing about days spent in arcades suppressed by a heavy fog of B.O. was enough to make me want to relive past glories with MAME. Though I quickly came to the conclusion that my opinion of the X-Men arcade game in hindsight was grossly optimistic.

I always found the introduction to the game to be quite short. Abrupt, even, when compared to the multi-layered and overly complicated backstories you might see in a 2D fighter at the time. Facing Magneto was clearly your ultimate goal, but why did he have an army of Sentinels at his disposal? Weren't they built to eliminate mutantkind, of which Magneto was clearly a member? The selection of playable mutants was also puzzling. Though the four player version of the arcade game was more common, the six player version had Wolverine, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Storm, and Dazzler as playable characters. Dazzler? Clearly a product of the 70s, Dazzler's "power" is to turn sound into light energy. The game designers were evidently unfamiliar with the comic books. Or more accurately, completely out of touch with what fans wanted to see in an X-Men game.

The X-Men arcade game attempted to recreate the beat 'em up action of Final Fight and Captain Commando, but the enemies in the game were boring and repetitive. Indeed, it was difficult, but you didn't get to fight things that weren't robots until you got to the Savage Land where you fought a bunch of Lizard look-alikes and robots. The special abilities, though brutally efficient in clearing the screen, were equally trite. Wolverine probably had the best power, even though it didn't make any sense. Cyclops was limited to exploding, which I can only assume was an uncontrolled optical blast. Wolverine had his claws to fight with, but everyone else was limited to punching. I understand that technology was probably a factor (this was, after all, 1992) but it seems to me Konami's interpretation of a multiplayer X-Men adventure was simply lazy and uncreative. Compared against this low-fi predecessor, Legends seems a much more palatable recreation of Marvel's superhero team.

sitting still was never enough