X-Men: The Arcade Game is a throwback to the days before X-Men: The Animated Series. That show, known for it’s amazing title track and some pretty laughable moments, gave us the “traditional” X-Men lineup most of us know today. However, before that aired, there was a one-off pilot called X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men. In it, Wolverine had an Australian accent.

It was pretty horrible.

Pryde of the X-Men served as X-Men: The Arcade Game‘s inspiration; inside, you play as the X-Men that were present in the cartoon, and face the villains they faced, as well. The original game stood out in arcades for a few reasons: it was a two-monitor, six-player cabinet, much larger than most other games, and actually quite fun to play.

Android recently got their hands on a mobile port of the game, this time using touch controls instead of the ol’ joystick. Players will choose one of six heroes (Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Dazzler or Colossus) and mash the “punch” button on their way through a number of unique levels.

Villains from the comic make their appearances as end bosses, usually with really horribly-translated quotes, like “Pyro will turn you to toast!” and “I am Magneto, master of magnet!” This was part of the camp appeal of the game, and for its continued appreciation in beat-em-up circles.

Thankfully, you’re given the option of a stage select before you choose your character; this eliminates the quarter-draining practice of making you start from the beginning every time you play. This is one of the many mobile-friendly mechanics that were added to the emulation, like high-resolution portraits to the characters and an updated menu screen.

Actions are pretty simple: you’ve got a “punch”, “jump” and “mutant power” to choose from. Jumping’s a bit tricky to get ahold of, and it seems that jump attacks are rarely effective. However, this game introduced some novel concepts to the arcade: you can stomp enemies while they’re down, throw them, perform multiple-hit combos and backwards attacks. These all carry over to the mobile version.

Controls are handled through on-screen buttons, which work fairly well. They’re responsive and work well with multi-touch, but sometimes I find that it’s much too easy to hit the “mutant power” screen-clearing attack when I want to hit the “punch” button. The d-pad could definitely have been replaced by a joystick for more precision controls, but it performs well enough once you get the hang of where the boundaries of touch are.

As these arcade games are primarily made for (and mostly impossible to complete without) multiplayer, Konami has included a multiplayer mode which allows up to four players play together. However, all players need to be on one Wi-Fi network; they’ll then join one player, who acts like a host. I sadly didn’t get a chance to try this out, but I’m optimistic about multiplayer over a local network.

To be honest, I’m surprised they even included multiplayer at all. I’ve seen a lot of ports that fall into the “cash in” territory, but this game really feels like they’ve made an effort. It really gives me the feeling of Street Fighter II: HD Edition for the Xbox Live and PSN systems: while they didn’t re-draw everything, the updates they have made bring things up to speed. It’s nostalgic without being impractical.

As far as emulation goes, X-Men actually plays quite well. There’s the option of playing in 4:3 or 16:9 resolutions (which stretches the screen a bit), but both modes look great on my Atrix. The original cabinet featured two screens, so the lack of play area here is probably the reason they’ve scaled the number of players back from six to four.

For nostalgic comics fans or people that hung out in arcades during the early 90′s, this game will be a worthwhile addition to their Android phone. The multiplayer component could be useful on long trips with friends, where the X-Men: Arcade PSN or Xbox Live versions aren’t available.

Frankly, it’s a perfect port of a game that was lauded as great. The touch controls make it a bit more iffy than, say, if it had Wii-Mote connectivity; but sadly the chances of a studio like Konami working with indie developers seems quite slim. $2.99 is probably the upper price limit for a game that I could find elsewhere, but for a unique multiplayer experience and a solid beat-em-up, you don’t have much to lose, here.

The Internet has made it easy to be nostalgic and videogame companies are
capitalizing on this sentimental wave by recycling their back catalog of arcade
games and updating them for the latest generation of consoles and gamers. It’s a
good bet since 80s classics like Asteroids are easy to program, extremely
playable and more attractive to the casual gamer, which is a large segment that
game companies want to draw into the regular game-buying fold. Speakeasy got to
play a few of beloved remixes at E3 this year.

Atari Centipede Infestation

Atari’s 8-bit Centipede mushrooms have become a fashion statement for
retro-leaning hipsters. Unfortunately, this reimagined version of the 1980 Atari
game does away with the minimalistic iconic imagery and opts for a lush
dew-speckled glade as your new playing field. You are now Max, a manga-esque
survivor of the apocalypse. The game takes place years after “Missile Command”
fails to stop the enemy nuclear salvos and the radiation has mutated a horde of
giant insects that you must stop from consuming all of the remaining nutrients
left on earth.

Instead of a top-down 2-D view, the game now sports a ¾ perspective and the
360-degrees of shooting is akin to the 80s arcade game “Robotron” since insects
attack you from all sides, said Armando Soto, designer of Centipede Infestation.
As you advance through 35 levels, you fight various small and big bosses, which
are mutated uber-centipedes, moving very much like the multi-segmented villain
in the original game. Throughout the game, you can pick up new weapons that are
dropped by spiders and then, for very brief moments, toast enemies with a
flamethrower or acid bombs. It’s a very different game than the original but a
worthy successor in spirit.

Centipede Infestation will be available this Fall for the Nintendo Wii and
Nintendo 3DS. To read more of this article in the WSJ click here

How obsessed are you over playing or staying connected to Ms.Pacman? Apparently that’s all this dedicated gamer has not only in his head but on it too! Seriously check it out! It looks great and was done by BodyMod.org. Do you think it hurt? It looks painful and I know foot tattoos hurt because of the blood vessels that are right under the skin. I think the scalp is very similar. OUCH!

Crazy Otto was the original name for the mod by GCC who developed the update kit for Pacman. It was later changed to Ms.Pacman, here is a really cool and interesting article on the makingings of Ms.Pacman a true classic arcaade game if ever there was one.   Doug Macrae – The GCC Story

Here are a few pieces of triva for you. If you have any other interesting information or articles on Asteroids let me know so we can share them with the classic arcade game community.

TRIVA:

Originally called ‘Cosmos’, Asteroids‘ original design brief was a simple copy of “Space Wars (Cinematronics)”; with asteroids littering the play-field purely for visual effect. ‘Cosmos’ was also once known as ‘Planet Grab’, in which the player had to claim a planet by touching it with their spaceship. ‘Cosmos’ allowed players to blow up the planets and duel with another ship, Space Wars-style. Only in Asteroids, which arrived 2 years later, did Atari engineer, Lyle Rains, introduce the concept of free-floating rocks.

On 17 June 1980, Atari’s Asteroids and “Lunar Lander” were the first 2 video games to ever be registered in the Copyright Office.

The first 200 Asteroids machines were actually “Lunar Lander” cabinets; Asteroids was so successful that Atari cut Lunar Lander’s production run and released the 200 aforementioned machines, complete with their original Lunar Lander cabinet art.

Asteroids remains Atari’s bestselling arcade game of all time, with approximately 56,565 units produced (47,840 upright and 8,725 cocktail) in total.

* Remembrances from the Video Game Masters : working on Asteroids was so intense that Lyle Rains and Ed Logg often dreamt about their work. Lyle Rains : ‘In the course of my work I have always found that there are times during the development process when the project gets to me in such a way that I’m eating, drinking, sleeping, and breathing the project. When I close my eyes the images of the screen are there and I dream about them at night. There is something just very intense when you live with a project like that day and night, for months at a time. When we were working on Asteroids, I would play Asteroids for a number of hours in the evening, then I’d go home and I’d close my eyes, and as I was drifting off to sleep I’d see the asteroids floating around the screen.’.

Ed Logg : ‘I was shooting the asteroids all night long; I’d just play the game over and over and over in my head, just as if you were playing it in real life. To a certain extent, I play a lot of the games in my mind long before I ever write them because you have to get all the interactions down pat before you can start programming. I know what it’s going to look like before I even get there.’.

* Popular from the Start : a good barometer of a game’s future success was how popular it was within the labs at Atari. The software developers often had to chase people away from their Prototype machines when they arrived at their desks in the morning or returned from lunch. Lyle Rains : ‘The development on the really good games gets bogged down, because people want to play them all the time. I was in the lab quite often playing Asteroids, as were many other people.’.

On the overall popularity of Asteroids, Steve Calfee said : ‘A lot of people really liked it. Somehow, there’s something about people, they like to clean spaces. With Asteroids it’s easy to measure your accomplishment, you’re breaking big rocks into little rocks and then the little rocks into nothing. It’s sort of a metaphor for life.’.

Rich Adam recalled his own first encounter with Asteroids : ‘I’ll never forget going into the lab and seeing that game for the first time. It was like an adrenaline rush. I’m out flying this spaceship and it’s the miraculous escape. I’ve got this situation where I’ve got tons of these boulders flying around the screen, I have almost nowhere to go. I get to blast my way out of it and cheat death one more time; that’s a good fantasy, you’ve got all these things flying around and yet you’re able to survive.’.

Howard Delman described what it was like creating the sounds for Asteroids : ‘In those days there were no all-purpose sound chips like we have now, so I had to create a hardware circuit for each sound. I would string together electrical circuits that would produce an output wave-form that corresponded to the wave-form of the sound. When put through an amplifier and a loud-speaker, it would sound like whatever I was trying to create. The boom-boom-boom background sound was sort of meant to be like a heartbeat, and the idea was that as the game progressed, the sound speeded up, and the player’s heart would speed up, too. You know, stress!’.

* The Great 25-Cent Escape : On the intensity of playing Asteroids, Ed Rotberg recalled : ‘Asteroids was just so intense in the fact that you had a concept of all around fantasy. You had to keep your eyes constantly in motion around the screen because the danger could be coming from any direction, at anytime, and it was always so imminent. In Asteroids it was just you out there, trying to survive. It’s an incredibly intense game. The tuning in terms of how fast the spaceship turns and how fast the bullets move and how far they go and how fast the asteroids can go, just all the tuning that Ed Logg put into that, is real artistry.’.

Asteroids is considered, artistically, to be a video-game masterpiece. Ed Logg opines : ‘The simple fact that the spaceship in Asteroids continues to move after you cut thrust, providing a wee glimpse of the Newtonian mechanics of actual space flight, triggered the imaginations of many users’.

Rich Adam said : ‘Asteroids fulfilled the fantasy of being out in space, with no gravity, and free floating. The spaceship had a very elegant grace. A lot of motion in the game had grace, even the way the boulders floated around.’.

And the game’s epic quality was noted by Ed Rotberg : ‘What Asteroids allows players to do is to put themselves in an incredible predicament, and then extricate themselves from it. You feel like a hero coming out of it.’.

There was a modified version of Asteroids that was given the nick-name “Turtleroids”; this was part of a long series of practical jokes against the vice-president of marketing for Atari who was feeling jaded in his feeling towards a game concept called ‘Turtle Races’. One day, Ed switched the PROMs of the golden edition of Asteroids in the lobby of Atari so that the little and big UFOs were replaced by turtles, thus providing them with a constant reminder. Another practical joke involving Asteroids was a slight modification in the prototype of the game, because Owen Rubin (initials ORR on most Atari high score tables) kept filling up the high score tables when the programmers were not around. So, they modified the program to replace Owen’s initials with Ed’s own to keep him away.

In a monumental display of overconfidence on the part of the Atari programmers, Asteroids rolls over at only 99,999 points. Several players during days-long marathon games have scored over 100,000,000…

Asteroids keeps track of up to 255 extra men. If the player has too many, the game may slow down, probably due to the processor having to draw all the extra men on the screen.

John McAllister holds the official record for this game with 41,838,740 points on April 5, 2010.

Asteroids inspired a catchy hit song by Buckner and Garcia called ‘Hyperspace’ released on the ‘Pac-Man Fever’ album.

An Asteroids unit appears in the 1982 movie ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’, in the 1983 movie ‘WarGames’, in the 1983 movie ‘Terms of Endearment’, in the 1983 movie ‘Joysticks’, in the 1984 movie ‘Night of the Comet’, in the 1984 movie ‘The Iceman’, in the 1985 movie ‘Remo Williams – The Adventure Begins’ and in the 1983 movie ‘The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie – Strange Brew’.

An upright Asteroids unit appears in the 38 Speical music video ‘Caught Up In You’.