Fan Recreation of X-Men Arcade Gets First Update Since 2024

For the first time in nearly two years, the fan recreating X-Men Arcade on Sega Saturn released an update.

X-Men Arcade Version 0.5.0D is linked in the YouTube video below, which homebrew developer hotrodx uploaded Monday. You can download it directly from Mega.nz here. It’s a ZIP file that contains a bin file and a cue file — easily droppable onto an SD card to play on real hardware via optical drive emulator or to burn to a disc for those using a PseudoSaturn Kai cartridge.

In the video description, hotrodx said version 0.5.0D shows off the following changes and fixes:

• Added Colossus as playable character
• Pink Sentinels dropping Life and Mutant Power pickups
• Additional Game Mode B, difficulty increased even with 1 Player
• Added projectile for Pyro
• Changed wall fire animation (Pyro’s entrance)
• Fixed missing shadow around the elevator area in Stage 4
• Marching sentinels no longer wait to reach center to break formation
• CD volume adjustment under pause menu
• Dazzler’s projectile speed and range adjustment

With the addition of Colossus, the game now includes all six of the playable characters from the original arcade title. He joins Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler and Dazzler.

Hotrodx told SHIRO! that the D in “version 0.5.0D” stands for “debug,” although the debug features have been stripped out of this release. “I just forgot to strip out the version string,” they said. The Konami code is still in there to give 100 continues, though.

Hotrodx’s X-Men Arcade project uses Jo Engine and the original game art assets of Konami’s 1992 beat ’em up to recreate it on Saturn. The game itself credits several people with helping hotrodx — jin315, AFruitaday!, Superjustinbros and George S ripped images; Magma Dragoon, Dcat and sc00pj0hn ripped audio; Riza and Uge are testers; and there’s a special thanks to Nobuhiro Fujii, Johannes Fetz, Javidx9 and Erwin Esteban.

Hotrodx uploaded their first iteration of X-Men in January 2024 when it consisted of just one level and two playable characters, Cyclops and Wolverine. At the time, they said this isn’t a port but rather an attempt to recreate Konami’s hit arcade game. “No source code from the original game was involved, so a lot of guesswork and approximations were implemented,” hotrodx said.

Several updates went public throughout 2024, culminating with Version 0.4 that December. Then the project went dark until this week.

“The long hiatus was just me starting playing games again,” hotrodx told SHIRO!. “Played around modern games such as driving games and action RPGs.”

They said they also treaded carefully after X-Men Arcade was included in a compilation on modern platforms in March this year, the Marvel MaXimum Collection.