METAL SLUG 3
Metal Slug 3 is one of the most highly regarded entries in a classic franchise that, along with Contra, has pretty much defined the “run and gun” sub-genre of action platformers and shmups.
The Metal Slug series has an emphasis on enemies crowding around (collision damage can’t kill you), conservation of power ups, and a variety of vehicles which appear throughout the game and change the way you move and fight for a limited time.
As for MS3 itself, it’s similar to Contra 3 in that it stands on a middle-ground between early platforming heavy run and gun shooters and the “boss fest” design of later games like Contra Hard Corps and Alien Soldier. The game is constantly switching up how you progress through stages, so it’s quite varied. There are also multiple paths through each stage, each of which plays differently.
– Real player with 39.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Arcade Co-op Games.
OVERALL: 9.5/10
The greatest METAL SLUG, while the first game kept a world war II theme throughout the game the second one added more crazyness to the mix, but the third one is litteral insanity ! A masterpiece of a 2D shooter/platform.
GAMEPLAY: 9.5/10
Get yourself a good pad or an arcade stick, boot the game at normal difficulty with 20 credits max and see how you fare against this challenge ! METAL SLUG 3 is like any other METAL SLUG (but a bit harder than other iterations): fast, precise, brutal and unforgiving. Only projectiles, moving tanks/vehicles can hurt you, this is vastly different from your usual 2D game where touching the sprite of an enemy hurts/kills you, this creates a trully unique gameplay. Hectic and chaotic as can be. Combine that with a whole array of weapons,“slugs” such as submarine, helicopter, jet, camel with laser turret or elephant or ostrich LOL ! And the classic slug of course ! Richest Metal Slug in terms gameplay variables. You have got to be tight and aware at all time, classic yet masterfully executed and with that METAL SLUG flair on top of it !
– Real player with 36.5 hrs in game
PAC-MAN™ Championship Edition DX+
This game is absolutely bonkers, in a good way though.
PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+ is like normal PAC-MAN, only the map is rotated 90 degrees, there are tons of ghosts instead of just 4, and it’s a race to eat as many dots, food and ghosts as possible before the timer runs out.
The game is split into several boards with different structures, dot and ghost positioning, and paths to follow. None of them really feel any harder than the others, but they’re all difficult in their own way. The DLC boards are a fun addition, but I wouldn’t recommend you buy them separately from the game, since it’s cheaper to buy the full Big Eater pack and just get all of it at once.
– Real player with 14.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Arcade Score Attack Games.
Hello Everyone,
It is time to munch, chomp, and manoeuvre your way through another series of mazes with Bandai Namco’s notorious pelt eating ghost munching spherical maze racer, Pacman in “PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+”. This game is not your original Pacman but a new fast pace version that will keep you on the edge of your seat every step of the way.
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ is an arcade score attack game that takes its inspiration from the original Pelt Muncher that was first released in 1981. This time around though Pac-man has been turned into a speed run crushing dynamo taking on hoards of ghost that are determined to get in your way as you try to climb to the top of the leader. With that being said, lets begin talking about the gameplay.
– Real player with 12.7 hrs in game
ARCADE GAME SERIES: DIG DUG
While many ports of this game suffer from processor speeds that differ from the original (NES port in particular. nearly all online emulators use the NES version). smaller screen size(Gameboy and GBA) or poor graphics(Mac/commodore/Atari ect.) This port does not have any of these problems. It plays exactly like the original arcade cabinet. So if It doesn’t feel right this is probably the reason.
Some may find backgrounds annoying but I personally don’t mind.
If the price seems a little steep don’t worry there is quality here. Most free ports use the NES version and it’s one of the worst ports of this game. Your money will be well spent.
– Real player with 139.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Arcade Singleplayer Games.
Hello Everyone,
Looking back fondly on my youth, I decided to play one of the earlies titles in my memory. That title is one of Namco’s biggest Digging Juggernaut’s Dig Dug from the Bandai Namco Arcade Game Series. With our introductions out of the way let’s start this party.
Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug is a Steam adaptation of the original arcade cabinet of Dig Dug that was released by Namco in 1982. For those of you unfamiliar with this franchise, Dig Dug is a 2D style digging simulator where the players goal is to clear a series of levels with the highest scores that they can possibly get. In order to make score, players have to destroy enemy’s, collect hidden vegetables/fruit that appear on levels, or simply dig thought the bricks that is on the various stages.
– Real player with 10.8 hrs in game
ARCADE GAME SERIES: GALAGA
If you’ve ever played the original arcade game, you won’t notice any difference playing this one. It plays exactly like the arcade original. However, I don’t like the fact that the fire button is defaulted to the oversized spacebar. By default, the game is meant to be played with the left hand utilizing the movement of the ship (ie the arrow keys for example) and the right hand pushing a button to fire. This will require a player to have to “cross his hands” in order to use his right hand to press the spacebar. My suggestion is to allow the player to map any key he wants for movement as well as firing. Otherwise, change the default button to fire to say the Enter key on the number pad. Overall, this is a great game and the way it’s set up now, didn’t keep me from scoring 999,990, taking the top spot on the learderboard as well as completing successfully all 20 achievments in the game.
– Real player with 9.7 hrs in game
Great game, terrible port.
I love Galaga, but this port needed more work.
- Controllers\Joysticks not officially supported, and only kinda work
I tried using an Xbox 360 controller and it did work. However there’s no joystick deadzone, so if your joystick isn’t PERFECTLY centered at rest then you’ll be unable to control your ship properly.
Come on, who forgets to put decent joystick support in an arcade game?
- Can’t rebind keyboard keys
Just…why?
- Poor fullscreen support (Edit: kinda sorta fixed, see revisit edit at bottom)
– Real player with 7.8 hrs in game
ARCADE GAME SERIES: Ms. PAC-MAN
I have been in love with Ms. Pac Man since it came out in 1982. What can I say? I love the girl. I prefer floating fruit to stationary fruit because eating them is more of a challenge. If anyone knows anything about the design of Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man, they know that Pac Man has patterns you can master while Ms. Pac Man does not. The ghosts move around at random. This means you can get astronomically high scores on Pac Man while you can only expect to get in the 100,000’s in Ms. Pac Man if you are really good. For a long time in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the high score for Ms. Pac Man was in the 400,000’s as recorded by Twin Galaxies. I’m much better at playing Ms. Pac Man on a full size arcade machine using a joystick than I am pushing the arrow keys on a keyboard with my fingers. I think that is probably true for most arcade fanatics that love this game. However, it is always fun at the end of a long day to come to my computer and play a game of Ms. Pac Man. We are all very fortunate that Ms. Pac Man is available for purchase and play through Steam given the fact that there is now a lawsuit over royalties regarding the Ms. Pac Man game itself. Buy this game and enjoy it – it’s probably the only way you are going to be able to enjoy the original Ms. Pac Man in all its glory for a while.
– Real player with 26.4 hrs in game
Ms. Pac-Man is a classic. It surpassed Pac-Man in ways that most sequels can’t achieve. The levels are all symmetrical, mostly, and all offer that one spot where getting caught can be easy.
As most know, this is a third person maze game where you must eat all the dots and not get captured by the ghosts. If you eat the large dots, at each corner of the levels, the ghosts temporarily become vulnerable and you can eat them like a dot. Each level adds more speed to the level and less time where ghosts can be vulnerable.
– Real player with 5.8 hrs in game
ARCADE GAME SERIES: PAC-MAN
Pac-Man, the king of arcade games, seeing this game on Steam and on sale just made me insta buy the bundle that includes all of the other amazing arcade games, Galaga and Dig-Dug.
I will specifcally talk about the port :
I have played Namco Museum Essentials on the PlayStation 3 back in around 2011, and this port is slightly worse than Namco Museum Essentials, it includes more challenges and more game settings to mess around with.
The slightly bad thing about this game is that you can’t make the game fullscreen (from what I’ve seen so far), so you have to play with the backgrounds, don’t get me wrong, they are a very good backgrounds.
– Real player with 21.5 hrs in game
Classic game at it’s best. Simple yet difficult all at the same time. Navigate Pac-Man through each level to eat all the dots and stay clear from the ghosts. Different colored ghosts offer different levels of difficulty and if you want to get a high score you’ll have to get the special dots on the corners of the levels in order to make them temporarily vulnerable so you can eat them. Eat all four ghosts with each temporary vulnerabilities and you’ll get huge points.
The first levels are easy, but as you progress the speed of Pac-Man and the speed of the ghosts increase greatly to the point that they will catch up with you easily, forcing you to use the warp areas of the levels where it slows them down and they have to readjust for your new location.
– Real player with 8.5 hrs in game
Atari Vault
This review is going to be an unusual one as I’m actually going to write about a game that’s ate up a lot of my ingame time so far. I speak of Atari’s 1982 Gravitar.
I picked up Gravitar in passing whilst trying the Atari Vault and my first reaction likely followed many people’s, “This… is really hard. I think I’d rather play something I’m familiar with like Centipede or Missile Command instead.” This stayed true until I crossed paths with the Atari 2600 version of Gravitar. “I remember Gravitar was hard, I’ll see how the 2600 version is.” It was actually easier in the sense the gravity was not as quick to drag you under…but difficult in that many tunnels and small gaps were introduced in the absence of sharp vector graphics. With persistence I became good at it and with preserverance I looped through the game’s four universes. I was impressed with the game and quickly returned to arcade Gravitar to see if I had misunderstood a challenging but skill rewarding game.
– Real player with 48.7 hrs in game
Update
Edit: Since an update came out to issue black screen/control issues present on release for some, I have to mention that here. So if you read a review writing about control issues, be aware that most of them are patched already.
Ping
Ever wondered if could you play Pong against one of your friends online? Loved watching Sega Fanboy Mark of Classic Game Room playing Centipede and Missile Command and eagered to do the same? Well, now you can. And it would be a huge mistake not to do that.
– Real player with 14.8 hrs in game
SNK 40th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION
SNK 40th Anniversary Collection is a prime example of the sum being greater than its parts. Before I go on, this is the first time I played any of the arcade versions. Of the NES games back in the day, I only played Ikari Warriors I, II, and about 5 minutes of Ikari III (It was terrible then and it is terrible now).
Almost every single game in this collection borders on impossibly difficult to play. Additionally, most of these games did not age well; more than two-thirds of these games are just plain awful. Ikari Warriors I (NES & Arcade), Psycho Soldier (Arcade), Crystalis (NES), Iron Tank (NES), and to a lesser extent Athena (Arcade only) are the highlights. The rest are absolute bombs to middling at best. I really enjoyed Psycho Soldier, though. If you’re in a down mood, play this game. With its bubble gum-like voice, music, and singing, you’ll be walking on sunshine in no time…as long as you’re using the rewind feature. Which brings us to the saving grace of the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection - Rewind.
– Real player with 50.6 hrs in game
I really can’t recommend this set. I’d like to, I love old collections. I am completely in favor of preserving games, any games, so they can be seen by anyone who wants to. I don’t even mind the fact that a lot of games in this are bad. Bad games deserve preservation too. But I do wish more games on here were good. But worse than that, the collection as a whole suffers some major issues that really set me off. The controls being the biggest problem. A lot of the games in this set used special control mechanics in the arcade. That’s all well and good for the arcade, but it did make home ports that used more general controls harder to implement. They did their best here, utilizing a twin-stick style control for a lot of their games. But it doesn’t always work as intended. And worse, there is a glitch in there somewhere where every now and then it just reads one of the joysticks being full one direction, and never resets it. So every now and then - and it happens fairly frequently to be honest - you’ll just start veering off in one direction for a while. Combine that with controls that feel sloppy to begin with, and that’s a major flaw.
– Real player with 41.2 hrs in game
METAL SLUG X
OVERALL: 7.5/10
Great game, from a totally cult franchise, METAL SLUG. 7.5/10 because it’s mainly a remake of METAL SLUG 2, it’s definitely the weakest edition of METAL SLUG but still an amazing 2D shooter / platform for anybody not familiar with its even better counterparts METAL SLUG 1 and 3.
GAMEPLAY: 9.5/10
Get yourself a good pad or an arcade stick, boot the game on normal difficulty with 20 credits max and see how you fare against this challenge ! METAL SLUG X is like any other METAL SLUG: fast, precise, brutal and unforgiving. Only projectiles, moving tanks/vehicles can hurt you, this is vastly different from your usual 2D game where touching the sprite of an enemy hurts/kills you, this creates a trully unique gameplay. Hectic and chaotic as can be. Combine that with a whole array of weapons, “slugs” ranging from a camel with a mounted laser turret, to your classic metal slug (tank), to a top end military jet and now you’ve got yourself a game ! You have got to be tight and aware at all time, classic yet masterfully executed and with that METAL SLUG flair on top of it !
– Real player with 21.3 hrs in game
Why do people defend technical shortcomings in ports of retro console games, but flog modern companies when a PC release has any sign of console limitation?
The short of it is that this has “legacy” slowdown which just shouldn’t exist anymore. If any modern console game showed up on PC and had technical issues because it was a dump of a console game and not enough was done to hone it for PC hardware, it would be eaten alive. This game is a good game from a “retro” era, however shortcomings due to “retro” technology should get ironed out when something is released on superior technology and a price tag is attached. So despite liking the core game, I know realistically what it is, and I have to hit not recommended. What’s especially weird given all this is that one of the major improvements X made on 2 (it’s the same game being upgraded) was that it removed the slowdown - but in this version, the slowdown is back, so it isn’t even legacy slowdown here. It’s just a poor port.
– Real player with 10.5 hrs in game
BASEBALL STARS 2
Great little baseball game. But before buying be prepared to RAGE, cause game as arcade game was ment to take your coins. So winning in succesion isn’t easy, well only if you spend your childhood playing it. But for me as huge baseball fan that never played this before it takes a lot out of me. It will stress you to the point of losing your mind, but that sweet WIN makes up for it every single time. The biggest issue i have with it is NO SAVE option. And every game can take lot of time, 30-50 minutes deppending if there are extra innings. So playing 15 games league is almost impossible, except maybe pause idling it. But that is a big minus that you would have to do something like that just to be able to finish whole league. So every time you go out of the game you have to play from the start. Becasuse after every game you get option to select new and better player, making changes in your lineup, making you better as a team and giving the game replay value, But because there is no save option that is somewhat tedious to do.
– Real player with 44.9 hrs in game
WARNING:
Before you buy this sensational classic title, Please keep in mind that the save feature is 100% absent from this version of the game. I genuinely have zero idea why SNK thought it was a cute idea to remove this extremely vital feature, As it can actually make it possible for most regular people to complete the game. Instead, If your going for the World Championship game, You’re gonna need some tremendous skill, timing, knowledge, and of course, time. It took me about 6 to 7 hours to fully complete this game, & yes, I took a shower after playing. My soul hurts, for the extreme limits the user has to go through just to beat this game, & the lack of the F***** save feature. If you’re going for World Champion, Good Luck, & Godbless you.
– Real player with 15.3 hrs in game