Damocles wrote:So...I finally got around to picking this up.
Good god, man...the games that aren't shooters are mostly large pieces of crap. It seems to me like Taito had some great ideas but couldn't nail the details.
While there are some less than great non-shooters (Chakan Pop and Nastar, I'm looking at you), I highly disagree. I found there to be more than enough quality with games like Elevator Action II (despite the input and slowdown issues), Arabian Magic, Qix, Kiki Kaikai, Liquid Kids, Football Champ (though it has input issues), Don Doko Don, Bonze Adventure, and Cameltry. There are also games like Dungeon Magic that are flawed, but aren't piles of crap either.
Puchi Carat(ot), whatever. Great idea. Breakout mixed with Puzzle de Bowling. Wonderful. Too bad the controls are screwed and the system is flawed. Yaya...originally analogue...
The controls in Puchi Carat aren't screwed if the accelerate button option is turned on. With it off, the analog controls are hard to get used to. Puzzle de Bowling came out after Puchi Carat.
Darius Gaiden. Good stuff. I wasn't expecting rapid auto-fire so it wasn't a letdown.
It's important to note that it has added slowdown. Sometimes there's virtually none, but the game slows to a crawl in spots. The middle of Zone E and Neon Light Illusion are good examples of this. For this collection, I prefer G-Darius. No added slowdown like in Darius Gaiden and I found the visibility to be fine for a TV screen.
...and really, do we need 3 more version of Space Invaders? Mind you, '95 is friggin brilliant...
Three Space Invaders games that are vastly different. I feel we need them, especially since the older Majestic Twelve ports aren't 100% accurate and Akkinvader/Space Invaders '95 hasn't been ported much outside of Japan. Majestic Twelve is brilliant too, especially the bonus round with the cows.
For the most part, the puzzle games are fine and the shooters are fine. It's just that everything else in-between is crap.
Again, I disagree. Bust-A-Move Again with music that sometimes doesn't play at all is not fine. Metal Black still plays well, but that beam error, which should have been corrected, is most definitely not fine. As I said before, I feel the majority of the non-shmups aren't crap. I found some of the earlier games like Lunar Rescue to be fun too.
Also, some good news. It looks like the PC version is coming to the US.
http://www.ebgames.com/product.asp?product%5Fid=640005