Capcom classics volume two/PS2

[Alienblue]

CAPCOM CLASSICS VOLUME TWO / PS2 / A

The first PS2 Capcom collection was okay but not great......it had two versions of 1941, three of street fighter, and several games I never liked to begin with like Bionic Commando. Volume two is MUCH better. I traded several old carts for it and am very happy.

Calling these games classic is silly, though.....most were never released in the USA, and except for SF2 I never heard of most of these. But thats why its so great, its like a stack of brand new 16-bit era games!

CAPTAIN COMMANDO is a great follow up to Final Fight, with four characters. I loved the Baby in the robot, BABYFACE. BLOCK BLOCK is a good Arkanois clone. ECO WARRIORS is a REALLY japanese shooter, with a 360 degree weapon and very Darius-like graphics. MEGA TWINS is an adorable super mario type game, when SMB games were the rage. VARTH and 1941:HYPER SHOOTING are great vertical shooters. This 1941 is much better than on volume one. STRIDER is worth the admission price alone......just think the weak Genesis cart cost $75 when it came out way back when!

My only beef is that some of the games like VARTH and BLOCK BLOCK and 1941 are all reduced in size to one quarter of the screen, and it makes some things hard to see. I would have prefered a "wide screen" version of these because playing on my 13 inch monitor is hard on the i's!

But this is still one of the best collections for the PS2. Twenty games, at least a dozen of which are so good to have been sold as stand alone 16 bit titles for $60 or more back in the day.

With all these classic compilations, owning a PS2 is like having your own late 80's-late 90's arcade. Fun fun fun!

[Leo1]

I believe all of these games saw domestic releases in American arcades. Certainly, most of them at the very least did. I've even seen at least one Eco Fighters cabinet over the years, a game that was horribly overlooked at the time and is a true hidden gem on this collection.

Games like 1941 used vertically oriented monitors (So instead of the 4:3 aspect ratio we're all familiar with, they would instead have a 3:4 aspect ratio since the monitor has been rotated 90 degrees).

And since that just isn't practical at home for the average person, they're forced to run the game with large black bars on both sides of the screen in order to maintain the correct aspect ratio (They have to fit a 3:4 AR on to a 4:3 oriented screen).

There's really nothing else they could've done. It was either place black borders on the left and right that cover a good 2/3's of the screen or so, or distort all the proportions of the game.

I'll take the black bars.

[Julio III]

Speaking of arcade games with vertical (3:4 or TATE or whatever you want to call it) displays. Do this and other compilations allow you to actually play the games with a rotated screen. Its common for modern vertical shoot-em-up ports to do this but the only such retro collection I have (Namco Museum on the Dreamcast) doesn't allow me to do this - and it really annoys me, would be better to play Pac-Man and Galaga the proper way! I know some of the PSP compilations (well, at least the pinball games) allow you to play vertically, but do any of the console compilations?