As a young urban kid growing up on Jackson St, there used to be a pool room a few yards up the street from my old house called Mr. Joe’s Pool Room and I would often go there to mostly putting quarters into those big extremely heavy arcade machines despite that I was a very decent pool player.
I remember coming home from school and often going to Mr. Joe’s Pool Room to play at the arcades and some of my favorite arcade games that I played there at the time were Aliens, Cobra Command, Pac-Man, Pole Position, & X-Men.
I would often play the X-Men arcade game just to kick some bad guy ass especially knocking down the mutant hunting Sentinels and beaten them while they were lying down on the ground until they exploded.
Note: I would found out last year that the 1992 X-Men arcade game was based on the original X-Men cartoon pilot episode from 1989 called “Pryde Of The X-Men” which I actually saw and the five playable X-Men arcade game characters of Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Dazzler, & Colossus looked just as identical as they did in the original 1989 pilot episode of the X-Men cartoon series.
As with many beat-em-ups at the time, there are 8 stages to go through with Magneto being the toughest of all the boss characters that you face because he’s the final boss of the entire game and man I tell you, he will give you the most hell out of all the enemies that you face throughout the entire game. And I have been a fan of Magneto’s ever since I saw him in the classic iconic 1990’s cartoon series and he’s my favorite all-time X-Men villain. He doesn’t always play the role of a villain because he sometimes teams up with the X-Men to take down much bigger threats such as Apocalypse in X-Men Legends 2: The Rise Of Apocalypse & X-Men 2: The Clone Wars video games.
The soundtrack for the game was pretty good and my favorite track from the game was The Stage 2 theme because it had a hip-hop type of feel when the voiceover actor said X-X-X-Men throughput the chorus of the track and it sounded absolutely sick.
Each of the five playable X-Men had their own type of punches, kicks, attacks, super attacks and attacks when the enemies are on the ground and I noted out of all five of the playable characters, Colossus was the only one that couldn’t throw, but he had a move where he would grab the opponent’s head in a headlock type of position and sometimes one-shot them depending on the type of enemy that he was facing.
The Conclusion - Playing The X-Men arcade at Mr. Joe’s Pool Room so often during my childhood years was such an amazingly fun experience. I truly miss the days where the arcades were so hot from back in the days when I was younger.
By Kwame Shakir
