Capcom has been doing its best to recycle the companies’ history to make a few extra dollars lately, and heck if it works... why not do it? The latest addition to their collection series involves Capcom Collections Volume 2, which sports over twenty games. You may remember fairly recently that I reviewed the second collections game for the PSP, and quite honestly there were a few games that were copied directly over onto this game, which was a little annoying. This was annoying since I have played them before, but honestly the PSP was not the best system to play the games in the first place.
Looking back upon the past I now see why we evolved from those systems, because those games sucked… Graphically. It is hard to believe that I was amused by sprites like these. Perhaps it was the lead paint chips I ate as a child that made me love them, and so twenty or so years later... those chips have left my system. Twenty years from now though, I will probably spit after I say the words Playstation 3 simply because the graphics of the future will destroy their system, making me wonder if it was worth picking up it the first place. The same will be said of my Gameboy in two or three years, but perhaps I will draw the line there. In any event the collection shows off the graphics of the time, and even today they do look quite intricate and nifty. I believe at the time that they were published that they were also referred to as being radical, bodacious, and gnarly, so as aged as those words are they also hold true.
The collection yields classics like the original Street Fighter, but if that is not cool enough for you, there is the option of playing Street Fighter 2 Turbo on one of the three speed settings. They also host King of the Dragons and Knights of the Round, which fills in the compilation with good side-scrolling battle games. They are not alone in the genre though as Mega Twins, Captain Commando, Black Tiger, Strider, Three Wonders, Tiger Road, and Magic Sword are also included. Indeed it does seem to be a little over stuffed with these types of games, but having the variety is nice. I am very glad to see Captain Commando, Strider, and especially Magic Sword as I used to spend hundreds of quarters in the arcades on them.
The choice of games do not end there as you may also play Varth, Side Arms: Hyper Dyne, Last Duel, 1941: Counter Attack, and Eco-Fighters for flying games. The ones included on the PSP version play identically, and the others play quite nicely. There were two games that were in their own genre. The first one was Speed Rumbler, which was a cross between car game like Micro Machines, and Renegade for the NES. You attempted to either blow apart enemies while driving, or get out of your vehicle and do it by hand.
The second game was Quiz & Dragons, which was quite interesting and it even surprised me. In a way it was like a board game, where you would roll to see how many places you would move forward. Once you moved forward you would battle against a fiend, and to beat them you had to answer their questions correctly. You have a limited amount of health, so you need to correctly answer the questions while under a time limit. They have updated a lot of the questions, so you will most likely see questions for more recent games that you may know. There are other questions that remain in the game from 1992, so when playing the game it is best to think like you are currently in that year if you want to get them correct.
Something that is improved over the PSP version though is how you unlock addition additional content. To unlock the extra content you would need to achieving a certain score, making it passed a specific level, or completing a game. When you completed this you received tips, art, and music respectively. What I disliked about the PSP version is that you could unlock all the bonuses by playing on a slot machine. This meant that you never had to play the game to get all the backstage information. All and all I think this is much better than wasting hours on a slot machine, because if I wanted to do that I would go to a casino.
All and all, the games are better on the Playstation 2, verses the PSP, though they work quite nicely on the X-Box as well. The load times are much better, and there are enough buttons to properly play Street Fighter on these two platforms. The menu systems were decent, and overall everything loaded up fairly quickly. Of course I preferred a few specific games to others, but most of them were decent. The price is nice if you would rather buy them on disk, rather than wait for them to show up on a virtual console. Perhaps one day a company will release all of their old games on one collection, rather than a bunch of smaller ones to milk the consumer. In the end, Captain Gordon gives Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2 a B-.
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? CaptainGordonEdward@Gmail.com
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