Nothing moves the Blob: X-Men Arcade announced for XBLA, PSN

Was there anything better than the six-player X-Men Arcade cabinet? Of course …

My friends and I always went to a certain movie theater when I was growing up. It didn't have the best screens, the popcorn was stale, and the employees were surly. Of course, it did have one of the deluxe X-Men arcade cabinets in the lobby. You could play with up to six players, and the game had to be stretched across multiple screens to contain the action. That machine was legendary, and even now we have heated discussions about which characters had the best special moves.

X-Men Arcade

Now the game is coming to Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network.

This will be a straight port, albeit with re-recorded dialog, for up to six players. On the PlayStation 3 you can have everyone playing locally, while the 360 will require two players to play via Xbox Live.

The game will retain all its goofy charms, including the bad dialogue, finger-numbing gameplay, and the inability to have more than one person playing as each character. If you pick Wolverine, and I'd like to slice some things up with my own set of adamantium claws... no go. This is why character selection was such a loaded, political decision; you had to be within sight of the machine to call "dibs" on Nightcrawler, for instance.

We don't have any idea about release date or price yet, and the game probably won't hold up in terms of gameplay. Still, for those of us with fond memories of the original, this is going to be an easy sell. Welcome to die, my friends.