One
of the older members of the Armchair Empire, X-Man was feeding quarters
in ORIGINAL Pac-Man machines while other AE compatriots were still in
diapers. X-Man traces his videogame origins back to 1980, when his
parents gave him the choice of picking out either a Magnavox Odyssey or
the Atari 2600 system for his birthday. Being only 12 at the time, X-Man
took the sales advice of a shady Sears salesman who recommended the
Odyssey which X-Man and his parents unwittingly purchased, not knowing
then that the Odyssey was a bigger paying commission item. While all
X-Man’s friends bought and shared Atari 2600 games, spending
after-school time over each other’s houses totally enjoying themselves
playing their 2600s, X-Man and his Odyssey became the laughingstock of
the neighborhood's videogame players. After that, a shamed X-Man vowed
somewhere somehow someday to help gamers everywhere make decisions based
on gaming quality, not on someone’s commission agenda.
His chance came while playing Ms. Pac-Man at the local arcade a few
years later. Finishing off a high-score worthy game as the last arcade
patron one tempestuous Friday night, a freakily violent lightning storm
hit the arcade’s generator and sent 3,000 volts of pure electric
current through X-Man, who was only saved by his original Air Jordan
sneakers grounding his semi-electrocuted body. After a week in the
hospital, X-Man’s thankful-that-he-was-alive parents decided to let
him choose a new videogame system to play during his recovery. In the
midst of a return trip to that same Sears store, he avoided the advice
of that same Sears salesman and chose a Nintendo Entertainment System
over a clearance-priced (and higher commissioned) Atari 7800. While his
parents gravitated to the evilly deceptive sales pitch of the
aforementioned salesman, without blinking X-Man first scribbled down and
then spit out a ten minute critique of the 7800s faults and the NES’
benefits to break the sinister salesman’s convincing grip on his
parents. Although X-Man was still suffering from a mild case of amnesia
and couldn’t explain how he knew half of the stuff he wrote down, to
his amazement through the mysterious forces of the lightning strike he
found he now had the unfailing ability to quickly disseminate good
videogames and systems from bad in written and oratory review form (and
as he later discovered, the capacity to shoot small lightning bolts from
his index fingers every time a thunderstorm hit his hometown of
Philadelphia). X-Man knew he had to use his newfound power for the
forces of good videogame shopping. So, when he was old enough he
naturally applied for a job at the one place his new super ability could
do the most good: The Electronics Boutique. In his secret guise as a
manager of an EB store, he steered many an unwary customer away from
3DOs and Atari Jaguars by recommending the PlayStation and Nintendo 64
instead.
After he felt he could do no more in the restricted confines of a single
EB, X-Man set out looking for a group that had videogame superpowers
similar to his own but with a larger reach in the gaming community. He
found the perfect organization composed of those who shared similar
powers, the Armchair Empire, where he could use his extraordinary
ability as a videogame and system rating master to its fullest
potential. Like every superhero, X-Man has a young sidekick protégé,
Boxer X, the expert fighting-game champion player and reviewer. Boxer X
is really X-Man’s teenage son Anthony. Boxer X uses his inhumanly
strong and large thumbs in combination with his analytical skills of
fighting styles and moves to deftly battle his way through the N64's
Super Smash Bros. and the Xbox's Dead or Alive 3 to prepare for the
onslaught of fighters headed into the videogame realm this year. Soul
Calibur II, Tekken 4, Virtua Fighter 4 and the newest Mortal Kombat all
will be unrelentingly tackled by Boxer X as he uses his special skills
to assist X-Man in providing videogame consumers the knowledge of what
fighting games are worthy of their hard-earned money.
Side-by-side with Boxer X and together with all his other dedicated
Armchair Empire fellow members, X-Man promises to bring truth, justice
and the American way of good consumerism to videogamers everywhere,
particularly when it comes to the system that takes full advantage of
X-Man’s abilities, the Microsoft Xbox.
