39.Now back to those Arcade roots. X-Men The Arcade game was developed by Konami and loosely based off of the pilot X-Men Cartoon, X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men, which is where many of the enemies and team line-up come from. This game was kind of a big deal back in the day due to being a six player co-op experience and I can say that when you do get all six people playing, this game seriously rocks. Magneto has captured and re-purposed the Sentinels to use in his war against humanity, which he uses to attack a city. The X-Men travle there to stop them and their leader, Pyro only to learn too late that the attack was a ruse used for Magento and his Brotherhood to capture Professor X and Kitty Pryde. Traveling to M Island, which is totally not a poor copy of the Savage Lands minus Sauron, the X-Men battle major enemies like White Queen (remember when she used to be a villain?), Wendigo, Nimrod, and Juggernaut to rescue Kitty, before heading up to Asteroid M to battle Magento himself and rescue Xavier. The game introduced, to me at least, specials which my dumbass kid self used to feel were actual powers the characters had in the case of Wolverine and Colossus which could be used to clear out swarms of enemies. I can honestly say that I really love the lineup as well in retrospect, especially giving Dazzler, who I always felt was underrated in the series, the limelight. This game also got me to really appreciate Nightcrawler and Colossus even more. Why this game is ultimately here, is not necessarily due to being a great game. I mean it's a fun co-op brawler don't get me wrong, but it's really here because it kind of coincides with my love affair with comic books and may have been the game that got me from casually knowing about comic books to actively wanting to check them out, which was later solidified with the X-Men Animated Series. So in a way, this game represents a pivotal part of my childhood (along with another arcade classic we'll get to pretty soon) and simply trying to learn more about the characters from this game made me seek out all of those back issues where I fell in love with the franchise. Truth be told, I was once a huge X-Men fan and I consider the era between the Post-Dark Phoenix Saga to the end of the Age of Apocalypse to be the franchises Golden Age (early 80s to almost the mid-90s) where the series kind of moved away from fun but kind of trashy pulp stories where the team regularly fought off aliens and Dracula, to a story that really began to focus more on the characters and the growing cynicism about Xavier's dream of mutant acceptance. I came in around the Jim Lee era when the second X-Men book got launched, but I kept digging backwards to witness Storm losing her powers, Rogue starting as a villains and then begging to join the team, Colossus watching his sister lose her innocence when the team was trapped in Limbo, Wolverine losing his wife Mariko, and both the dissolution of the team in Fall of the Mutants, to all of them combing back together on Genosha to fight Cameron Hodge in Extinction Agenda. The Jim Lee era was fantastic as well with the new team line-up, my favorite incarnation of X-Factor, and great story arcs like X-Cutioner's Song and Fatal Attraction before climaxing with the mother smurfing Age of Apocalypse. I grew up with these characters and this game still brings me back to those days where I wanted to know more, which is why it's on this list.