• Taito Legends 2 gets a long-overdue U.S. release.Genre: Arcade compilation
Released: Listed May 17, 2007, but it appears to have not actually surfaced until June.
Systems: PlayStation 2, Xbox
Verdict: &&&Long after its European release, Taito's sequel to the popular retro arcade compilation Taito Legends comes to North America with 39 quarter-guzzling titles. The first compilation apparently used up most of the big Taito names — the likes of Space Invaders, Phoenix, Jungle Hunt, Elevator Action and Bubble Bobble were all there — leaving Taito Legends 2 with only Qix, the compelling but difficult box-drawing game, for marquee value. For the other three dozen-plus, it rounds up loads of obscurities from 1978 to the 1990s, a mix of fun and sometimes best-forgotten titles, as well as another handful of Space Invaders sequels.
Surprisingly, the cartoonish Space Invaders '95 has emerged as one of my favorites. Though it aims for silliness, it's a solid shooter with inventive aliens, handy power-ups and lots of colorful graphics. One update that doesn't work for me is Elevator Action Returns, which is too influenced by the fighting game nonsense of its time and strips away the brilliant arcade simplicity of the original. In fact, if you don't like the ninja-kicking, grenade-throwing, health-meter using games of the late '80s and early '90s, a dozen or so of these will be useless to you. From the puzzle genre, Cleopatra's Fortune is a Tetris wannabe that's trying way too hard, while the quite playable Puchi Carat features a ball bouncing around the screen Breakout-style to knock out jewels.
Early titles like Lunar Rescue and Balloon Bomber, both of which feel like cousins of Space Invaders, are generally forgettable, while Crazy Balloon, in which a balloon is moved around a pin-filled maze, is excruciatingly tedious and joyless. For each of those, however, there's a pleasant surprise waiting to be discovered. Cameltry, which has the air of a Marble Madness knockoff, is surprisingly addictive as the player rotates the entire screen to guide a ball through a maze to a goal, avoiding obstacles and picking up bonuses along the way. Raimais, in which the player navigates through a dot-filled maze while avoiding and destroying enemies, is a highlight, if yet another unoriginal concept. Several titles, including Don Doko Don, feel like variations on Taito's own successful Bubble Bobble.
The compilation offers no historical extras and isn't quite as slick in presentation as its predecessor, and you'll probably want to adjust the controller settings, which awkwardly favor the rectangle button for many of the primary controls. Despite the several weak games here, there are enough addictive nuggets to make this a must for anyone who was ever intoxicated by the sights and sounds of an arcade in the 1980s.// The games //Alpine Ski • Arabian Magic • Balloon Bomber • Bone Adventure • Cameltry • Chack 'n' Pop • Cleopatra's Fortune • Crazy Balloon • Darius Gaiden • Don Doko Don • Dungeon Magic • Elevator Action Returns • Football Champ • Front Line • G Darius • Gekirindan • Grid Seeker • Growl • Gun & Frontier • Insector X • Kiki Kaikai • Kuri Kinton • Liquid Kids • Lunar Rescue • Metal Black • Nastar • Puchi Carat • Puzzle Bobble 2 (aka Bust-a-Move 2) • Qix • Raimais • Ray Storm • Space Invaders '95 • Space Invaders DX • Super Space Invaders '91 • Syvalion • The Fairyland Story • The Legend of Kage • Violence Fight • Wild Western// Other games I'd love to see on a PS2 compilation // Crazy Climber • Frogger • Gorf • Donkey Kong • Scramble
• My inner video game geek wants to play.About my 12th birthday party took place at the local arcade, with me and my buddies feeding tokens into Galaga, Gyruss, Ms. Pac Man and other addictive quarter-guzzlers. I actually didn't spend as much time in the arcade as one might thing, although I've made up for lost time by purchasing just about every retro game compilation for the PS2 that I can get my hands on. For a boy growing up in the '80s, what was more exciting than video games? (On second thought, don't answer that.) I remember a time when I'd get up ridiculously early — something like 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning — to catch Starcade, the arcade game show in which two contestants went head to head on several machines for a chance to win their very own arcade game. Running from 1982-84, first on WTBS and then in syndication, the game featured all the old favorites and some obscurities — Pooyan or Holey Moley, anyone? The official Starcade website brings it all back, offering 10 episodes for streaming online. I'd forgotten how genial host Geoff Edwards (Jackpot, Treasure Hunt) would offer tips to the contestants, such as "stay to the left" on Congo Bongo and "go for the fruit" on Donkey Kong Jr. You're sure to spy some fun games you'd forgotten, such as Pengo, Gorf or the great Elevator Action. The awesome theme music reminds me of "Blinded by the Light" by way of the Wheel of Fortune theme circa 1979. Even more awesome, behold some of the geeky prizes, such as electronic chess, metal detectors and primitive home computers. The website also offers clips (check out Alex Trebek hosting one of the several pilots), contestant bios and updates, desktop wallpapers and the opportunity to buy episodes on DVD. There's also an exhaustive section covering every game played on the show, with promotional flyers and video clips of each game's intro as it appeared on Starcade. In a word, it's nirvana for '80s geeks.
• Assorted musings from the entertainment world.Jericho season split • CBS' nuclear serial is one of the few new dramas that got a full season order early on, but the network has decided the show will have an extended break after this week's episode, which will include a cliffhanger finale involving a murder. The show is set to return Feb. 14 with a recap of the first 11 episodes; the subsequent episode will flesh out back story with a look at life in Jericho a day before the bombs exploded. In the interim, the network is beefing up its Jericho content on innertube, including some original content and streams of all episodes to date. I thought the first episode of the series was outstanding, but my interest has since waned somewhat.
Sony Playstation 3 • What a brilliant marketing scheme: Ship so few units of the follow-up to the most successful console ever that many stores only get a handful of them on the first day of sale, resulting in a media frenzy. That aside, I don't think I'd fork over $600 for it unless it cleans the house and cooks dinner while I'm at work. As for Nintendo's much cheaper Wii with its motion sensitive controller, I don't think a session of video game playing should feel like doing calisthenics (although some might argue it's a good thing for sedentary youth). However, a decent lineup of games might pique my interest in the underdog console. Lots of retro stuff offered for download via the Wi-Fi connection might seriously pique my interest.The Real Match Game Story: Behind the Blank • GSN occasionally coughs up a solid documentary, and this is interesting, if not as good as the one about the Press Your Luck scandal. Now repeating at various times, this doc features interviews with key players such as panelists Brett Somers and Marcia Wallace, host Gene Rayburn (old interview footage) and key production staff. Ample clips remind the viewer of the knee-slapping, inebriated mood of the envelope-pushing '70s game, and a catty Somers candidly reveals that the other panelists secretly delighted in the moments when contestant fave Richard Dawson would flub a Super Match. Overall, a sadness pervades as Rayburn's daughter talks about how he never got over the show's cancellation.Burning Love (Remix) • There's a commercial — probably for a car, but I wouldn't know because I don't watch them — that's using an excellent remix of Elvis Presley's "Burning Love," one of my favorites from "the King." It's more or less in the style of the remixes of "A Little Less Conversation" and "Rubberneckin'." I want this mix (it's by something called Mowo), but it doesn't seem to be available anywhere. However, I've seen references to a remix album forthcoming.Kidnapped on-line • NBC, which has developed an overly itchy trigger finger during its time in last place, quickly axed the best new show of the season, Kidnapped. The remaining episodes are being burned off on-line, but you can't watch past episodes. I missed one or two because I didn't realize they were already airing them on-line, and I don't want to watch the rest without seeing what I've missed. Will this get a DVD release? Hello, NBC? Put them all on-line. It's a crime not to.Photo: Citizens of Jericho stand their ground. / CBS
Genre: Retro compilation
Released: Oct. 25, 2005
Game-play: &&&1/2
Presentation & extras: &&&1/2Loaded with 29 games, this collection throws in some that have no business appearing under the "legends" banner, but there are enough true classics here to make this an essential purchase for any member of the Atari generation. I felt like a lottery winner when I saw it would include Elevator Action, in which you make your way down an elevator- and escalator-filled office tower while shooting spies in the kneecaps and ducking in the red doors to steal documents. It's one of those games whose simplicity only enhances its appeal, and I can play it for ages without growing bored. I'd forgotten how much I love to see the spies tumble down the elevator shaft or get squashed underneath the elevator. I immediately noticed that the audio in Elevator Action seems less polished than that of the NES version, but maybe it's just me.
There are bigger names here, like Space Invaders, Jungle Hunt, Phoenix, Bubble Bobble and its sequel, Rainbow Islands. I actually never played Space Invaders in the arcade and am surprised at how difficult it is compared to the Atari 2600 version. Both its sequels are included, and, while Space Invaders Part 2 arguably doesn't tweak the game play enough, Return of the Invaders strays pretty far from the primitive original and appears to have been influenced by Galaga, even down to including a challenging stage. The most pleasant surprise is Tube It, a puzzler variation with dropping pieces for the Tetris crowd in which sections of pipe must be shifted to make connections from side to side before the screen fills to the top. It's about as compulsively playable as a puzzler gets. Speaking of puzzles, it seems odd to give us Super Qix here rather than its predecessor, Qix, the box-drawing game that may be the only title to make percentages fun. The sequel, Super Qix, relies on the gimmick of uncovering a picture as the player chips away at the game board.
Unfortunately, the game list is peppered with some pretty awful stuff amongst the winners. Some of the worst are Space Gun, a first-person alien shooter aboard a space vessel; Electric Yo-Yo, which amounts to gobbling up dots; and Plotting, a block-busting game that just doesn't pop. There is one uninspired racing game and several ordinary fighting titles. Colony 7, in which the player defends buildings from incoming missiles, is a difficult Missile Command clone, and Plump Pop, a cute game in which the player bounces an animal off a trampoline to pop bubbles in the sky, is impossible to execute with the PS2 controller.
I've found instances where the difficulty settings are a bit confounding. In Elevator Action, for example, the easy setting starts with six men and offers a free man at 10,000. The medium setting starts with three men and makes you crawl to 15,000 – too much – to earn the freebie. Neither setting seems logical. Thankfully, you can rectify this with a custom setting, but this nice feature is hampered by the fact that the game won't save high scores for games played with customized difficulty. For gamers who enjoy cheat codes, some are included in the game descriptions.
Despite some filler, Taito Legends is neck-and-neck with Midway Arcade Treasures for best retro-gaming compilation. While the few interviews with game designers aren't as fun or interesting as those of the first Midway collection, the developers deserve praise for the presentation. The interface is sleek and functional, and I'm in love with the techno menu music that's based on the steady march of the Space Invaders. It's nearly as addictive as clocking those Elevator Action baddies in the kneecaps.// The games //Battle Shark, Bubble Bobble, Colony 7, Continental Circus, Electric Yo-Yo, Elevator Action, Exzisus, Gladiator, Great Swordsman, Jungle Hunt, Ninja Kids, The New Zealand Story, Operation Thunderbolt, Operation Wolf, Phoenix, Plotting, Plump Pop, Rainbow Islands, Rastan, Return of the Invaders, Space Gun, Space Invaders, Space Invaders Part 2, Super Qix, Thunderfox, Tokio, Tube It, Volfied, Zoo Keeper// Linkage //The impressive official site, with game information and screen captures, downloads, a forum and more.// Related post //NAMCO Museum 50th Anniversary Arcade Collection
Genre: Arcade classics
Curious fact: Rather than video games, the 50th anniversary stems from NAMCO's rides for small children commonly found outside department stores.
Verdict: Games &&&1/2, Presentation & extras &&It's a little sad, maybe, that probably 50 percent of my gaming time on a modern console like the Sony Playstation 2 is devoted to compilations of classic arcade games like Pole Position, Tapper and Galaga, but that's fine with me. With each passing year, it is abundantly clear that I will remain hopelessly nostalgic for the decade of Atari and Miami Vice. My weakness for these simple yet insanely addictive games is such that I'll snap up a compilation like NAMCO Museum 50th Anniversary Arcade Collection just to gain a few titles I didn't already have, like Pole Position II, Bosconian and Galaga 88. This is really just a retread of the previous PS2 NAMCO Museum release – there's even a "greatest hits" label on it – but there are a few more games (16), and it thankfully corrects the audio problem from the Nintendo 64 NAMCO Museum version of Galaga, wherein the audio cues of the challenging stages were mixed up. On the other hand, Ms. Pac-Man seems twice as difficult here; the ghosts are ruthless, and I'm struggling even to make it to the third maze configuration where the banana appears. My strategy there: Snag a power pellet and go straight for the fruit. Similarly, differences in the controller response between the N64 and PS2 versions of Pole Position are giving me fits. Other disappointments include a curiously low audio level and a complete lack of extras. Bonus-laden compilations like Midway Arcade Treasures make this one seem particularly threadbare. Of the remaining games, the unlockable Galaga 88 is perhaps one of the best sequels ever, adding snappy new visuals, aliens and sound effects while retaining the essence of the game. The other unlockable, Pac-Mania, is a sort of 3-D Pac-Man with a fifth ghost and the ability for Pac-Man to jump, and it just goes to show that Ms. Pac-Man was as far as that one needed to evolve. Best of the games I'd never played is Mappy, which, with its levels, doors and trampolines, brings to mind Elevator Action, and I can't stop playing it. Bosconian, which feels like a cross between Galaga and Sinistar, grows old quickly, and Rally-X has the sophistication of a weak Atari 2600 title. Nevertheless, for anyone bred on the classics, this will do nicely until Taito Legends arrives on Oct. 25.// Included games //
Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Galaxian, Dig Dug, Rally-X, Pole Position, Pole Position II, Xevious, Dragon Spirit, Bosconian, Rolling Thunder, Mappy, Sky Kid, Galaga 88 (unlockable), Pac-Mania (unlockable)
• Taito Legends 2 gets a long-overdue U.S. release.
