X-Men

Arcade Games: X-Men is an arcade game produced by Konami in 1992. It is a side-scrolling beat 'em up based on the characters of the same name under license from Marvel Comics. The animation of the X-Men and the supervillains is based on the 1989 X-Men pilot episode titled Pryde of the X-Men.

The player chooses one of six X-Men: Cyclops, Colossus, Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, or Dazzler. Their objective is to stop the villain Magneto from wreaking havoc on human civilization. They must fight through an army of hundreds of Sentinels and supervillains such as Pyro, Blob, Wendigo, Master Mold, The White Queen, Juggernaut--who strangely wields a bazooka in his boss fight-- and Mystique, who was also a boss enemy in the game, although she simply took the form of Magneto and attacked players with punches and kicks. Later, Magneto kidnaps Professor X and Kitty Pryde, prompting the heroes to go on a rescue mission.

Although Final Fight set the standard for scrolling fighters, X-Men contained several 'improvements' including the ability to hit fallen opponents to prevent them from getting back up (as first seen in the arcade game Crime Fighters by Konami (1989) and its sequels), as well as a character-specialized "mutant power," which could clear most of the screen of enemies (like the 'crowd control' attack in Final Fight achieved by hitting both the jump & attack buttons together). Those mutant powers can be stored like items (similar to Golden Axe's magic powers), but if there are none stored the mutant power can still be used, but it slightly reduced the player's health.

Depending on the machine, the maximum number of simultaneous players varies from two to six. The six-player version used a multiple screen set up, similar to The Ninja Warriors.