X-Men pinball table rivals the world’s greatest water parks

Posted by on December 16, 2011 in Reviews

I’m having a hard time warming up to the X-Men table. It’s clean, sleek, and open. But I don’t know why the Marvel Vengenace and Virtue bundle has an X-Men table. We already have an X-Men table. It’s called Wolverine.

I guess this table is about the rest of the X-Men. Having seen all three movies, plus the latest Teen X-Men movie, I thought I was an authority on these guys. However, this table taught me that there’s an X-Man named Hank. Hank the X-Man. You light up the four letters of his name. If there were X-Men named Earl, Otis, Dick, Carl, Chet, or Opie, they would also qualify for this feature. I’m not sure what Hank’s mutant superpower is, but it’s sure not thinking up cool superhero names like Phoenix, Dark Phoenix, or Jean Grey. By the way, because this is an E-rated game, they can’t say the full name of Juggernautbitch.

I question the basic premise of this table, which is the X-Men fighting Magneto. I’m not convinced of the wisdom of using a steel ball to go up against a guy whose mutant superpower is telekinetic magnetism. But there’s Magneto, front and center, doing archvillain stuff like grabbing your balls. Speaking of balls, my favorite thing about this table is the waterslide. There’s a really awesome waterslide running down the right side of the table. Splash Mountain has nothing on the X-Men lair.

Suffice to say, X-Men is no Fantastic Four. When it comes to team-based tables, I’d just as soon hang out with Rock Hulk, Stretchman, Invisible Girl, and whoever the fourth guy is — Doc, I think — shooting the ball up the Wayne Tower to unlock missions.

3 stars
Xbox 360

  • Michael Sommers

    I’m pretty sure Hank is Henry “Beast” McCoy.  So your authority is still intact.

  • http://twitter.com/kentdoggydog Brian Kent

    Tom, are you drunk blogging again?

  • Jason

    Beast = Hank

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_%28comics%29

    “Beast (or The Beast), Dr. Henry Philip “Hank” McCoy, is a comic book character, a Marvel Comics superhero and a member of the mutant team of superheroes known as the X-Men.”

  • http://twitter.com/gndwyn Urthman

    It’s called “trying way too hard to hide the shameful depths of his comic book knowledge.”

  • Alan Kleiman

    Hey, Tom, did you manage to recover your XBL account?

  • Anonymous

    No, I use it too much. Customer service maintains they need to shut down Xbox Live for at least 30 days if I want to get back the money that was stolen when someone hacked my account. I have up to a year to decide to do that, and I certainly wasn’t going to do that during the busy holiday release season.

    So my Microsoft Points remain stolen and Microsoft remains as colossally unhelpful as they were the many many times I had a broken Xbox 360.

  • Anonymous

    Aw, come on, I did so well at pretending not to know the names of the Fantastic Four!

  • Anonymous

    Gorph.

  • http://twitter.com/gndwyn Urthman

    Can that possibly be anything but a scam to prevent people from getting anything back when their account is stolen?

    Imagine a bank saying, “Sorry your VISA card was stolen.  We can investigate these charges you say aren’t yours, but you’ll be without a credit card for at least 30 days.  Or you can take the loss instead of us and continue to use your credit card.”   Those kind of shenanigans are probably illegal if a bank tried to do it.

  • Inverarity

     This is a board I liked the first time I tried it and now I haven’t liked it since. I’m not sure if it just feels generic, or it’s not that good, or there are simply too many damn comic book boards, but I like both Thor and Moon better. I’ll take Rocky & Bullwinkle too, but that’s another story

  • Anonymous

    Don’t tell anyone, Inverarity, but I think I kind of like Rocky & Bullwinkle, too. It’s like playing some quaint old machine from a museum. I used to think it was awful, and I’m not convinced it isn’t, but at some point, I developed a strange affection for it.