Revolution X

There's nothing more rebellious than listening to your dad's favorite rock band. Decades past their prime, Aerosmith became the subjects of this utterly baffling light gun shooter. Revolution X turns the sex-craved, drug-addicted rock group into freedom fighters for a new generation. Suddenly songs like "Sweet Emotion" and "Walk This Way" become anthems for a new world war. Oh, the horror!

Revolution X is hard to wrap your mind around. As an arcade game, this 1994 release shares a striking resemblance to the Terminator 2 arcade shooter. You fight from one area to the next, trying to liberate the world from New Order Nation's military forces. This involves shooting down helicopters, blowing up buildings, tearing down tanks and, eventually, traveling around the world delivering freedom.


What does this have to do with Aerosmith? Not a whole lot, as it turns out. For the most part, the band is limited to only a few brief cameos. You'll occasionally hear one of their songs, there are posters of the band scattered about and each musician gets one line of poorly-written dialog to deliver. At their most useful, Aerosmith is a guide, pointing out what needs to be done and helping out the cause by donating their car. But let's not fool ourselves, that's not even 1% of Revolution X.

Forget precision, this is a game about spraying the level with rapid-fire bullets. Enemies rush in from all sides, so you might as well keep that trigger pulled. You start out with a regular gun, but it won't take long before you're slinging CDs at a dizzying speed. This may be exciting at first, but much like the Terminator 2 arcade game, Revolution X has a hard time developing it past the quick thrill. It's impossible to spend more than five minutes playing this Genesis cart without wanting to turn it off and never experience another game ever again.


As a light gun game, Revolution X is shockingly poor. The pacing is bad and the Menacer's reaction speed doesn't cut it. Unsurprisingly, this game is even worse with a standard issue game pad. The cursor moves too slowly and the options are woefully inadequate. The only proper way to play this is with a light gun, and even then you probably shouldn't play it.

Between the terrible graphics, unintelligible digitized soundtrack, poor gameplay and unnecessary cameos by a band well past their prime, Revolution X is the perfect storm of awful. As far as mindless shooters starring 1970s hair bands goes, this is one of the worst. What I wouldn't give for a first-person shooter starring Enya.