Last one on plays as Dazzler
Not so long ago there was a very special day. Not my birthday (any gifts should be sent to me by June 15th), but a day that will forever go down in XBLA lore. On April Fools Day 2011, X-Men: The Arcade Game was reduced to only 200 Microsoft Space Dollars. For a few days the servers were packed with random strangers who had picked the game up on the cheap. I could jump from one random game full of 6 players to another with mutated ease.
However, this is not a tale of random games with like minded X-Men fans, but a warning for those who spend too much energy seeking achievements – if you live by the achievement, you can die by the achievement.
What exactly has Dazzler packed in her lunchbox?
Some time after the fabled “day of cheap X Men”, I finally found time to tackle the game with a friend of mine who could be termed a more ‘casual’ gamer. We decided to play the game on Expert as the game’s infinite credits meant that completing the game should still be easy enough and a nice 25G achievement would come our way. To further glean the game of achievements I left the game open for the general public in the hopes of unlocking ‘You Fell to Our Trap’ and ‘Master of Magnet’, both requiring all 6 positions to be filled. The theory was that we should both get an easy 80Gs out of the game, no problem.
But then the greed monster game to visit, my friend suggested:
What if we also get the ‘Grounded’ achievement? All you have to do is not press A on level 4
All this required was no jumping on level 4, another easy 10 Gs.
With the game started the pursuit of imaginary gaming credibility should have gone to the back burner. All of a sudden I was back in the arcades of my youth, but rather than having a measly 20p to work with, I had a pocket full of 10ps and no adult to tell me when to stop. Within moments 3 other players had entered the game bringing us up to 5. Which character was left? Dazzler of course. Who willingly plays as Dazzler?