The 1992 X-Men arcade game is probably my favorite old school arcade beat'em up. Back in the early 90s they had it at my local Wal-Mart. Back when the little area you walked in before you got into the store was filled with arcade machines. Ah those were the days!
Anyways I was playing it on MAME and went into the service menu to set it to free play and noticed the difficulty option. It can be set from 1-Easiest to 8-Hardest. The default setting is 4-Medium. So I thought why not crank it up to 8 and see how different it is.
It is quite different.....
Wow! It throws an insane amount of enemies at you. I suppose it is impressive that it is able to put that many sprites on the screen at the same time with no slow down. I played through the first two levels on both easiest and hardest. On easiest it took me about 4 minutes. On hardest it took over twice as long at around 8 minutes 40 seconds. I just think it is insane how many enemies come at you on the hardest setting.
Here is the video comparing the two. Easiest mode starts at 8:40
I tried the hardest difficulty on the 6-player dual-screen version and it seems to have even more enemies on screen
As you can see I had all six players mapped to one controller so I could have all 6 player characters in addition to the enemies. It is kind of odd for me to see a character on-screen that isn't Wolverine. Ever since I first played the X-Men arcade way back in the early 90s I've always picked Wolverine.
6-player mode would be a pretty good time if I knew 5 other people who would want to play it!
Even for just 1-player the 6-player one is great on Mame since it basically is in widescreen. You do have to stretch it a bit vertically if don't want black bars at the top and bottom. I've got it stretched in the video I uploaded and I think it looks fine. I'm not an aspect ratio snob like some people. As long as it doesn't look super obviously stretched I'm fine with it.
