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Collection essentials #585: Midway Arcade Treasures 2

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I’ve already talked about how companies during this console generation were getting in the habit of releasing compilation discs of their old arcade games. So it made sense for the prolific Chicago-based company Midway to do the same. Midway released a great many arcade games back in the day, many of which became very popular. I’d probably say that they’re my favorite non-Japanese arcade game developer. Even before arcade compilations were cool, they had already dabbled in the “arcade port compilation” business in the mid-90s on previous consoles, with a handful of titles per release. The compilations in this console generation would be bigger and better. The first Midway Arcade Treasures game focuses mostly on games from the ‘80s, with a couple 1990 releases thrown in. It’s quite a good collection, including many recognizable names such as Defender, Rampage, Smash TV, Paperboy, Marble Madness, Gauntlet, Joust, and more. I didn’t put it on this list, in part because there are other comp...
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Collection essentials #584: Mega Man Anniversary Collection

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Mega Man was one of the most prolific series from one of gaming’s biggest companies. The NES console alone was home to the first SIX Mega Man games. So rereleasing and compiling the games in the main series made a lot of sense. The six NES Mega Man games first got rereleased on the original PlayStation only in Japan. These ports retained the original graphics and weren’t full remakes, but contained more enhancements than you’d normally see from an NES port. Thankfully, Capcom figured that American gamers ought to have something similar, so a few years later they gave us this compilation which contains the first eight mainline Mega Man titles along with enhancements and bonuses. They also contain a couple obscure arcade games called Mega Man: The Power Battle and Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters. If you want more information on these games and what they’re like, please seek out my past blog posts about them.  Some of the enhancements were taken from the PS1 ports, though I understand ...
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Collection essentials #582 & #583: Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox) and Halo 2 (Xbox)

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Here are, unequivocally, the most successful iconic games on the original Xbox. Probably no other games at any time were ever more closely associated with the Xbox brand than the Halo games in their early days. The original Halo was a launch title, and was most definitely the game that truly put Xbox on the map. The Halo games are first-person shooters. They were far from the first games in the genre, or even the first successful FPS games on consoles (as opposed to PC). But they advanced the genre very significantly and set a new standard for what fans expected from a console FPS. The first game’s story places you in control of Master Chief, the dude on the cover who wears a green suit. He fights in a war against a dangerous legion of aliens known as the Covenant. The good guys discover a very large, mysterious, inhabitable ring-shaped entity known as Halo, which is where the series gets its name.  I’m not going to talk any more about the story, because the single-player campaign ...
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Collection essentials #581: Fuzion Frenzy (Xbox)

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PlayStation dominated the video game market for years starting when the original system reached all the major worldwide markets in 1995. However, one thing that was never really a strong suit for them was multiplayer party games. The original console had the standard two controller ports, and gamers could buy a “multitap” adapter to play with more than two players, but this requirement meant that party games were always going to be a niche part of the PS1’s library. The Nintendo 64 was far less successful overall than the PS1, but it had four native controller ports and absolutely had a bigger reputation as the “party console” with a variety of hits for four players to participate in. Perhaps surprisingly, the PlayStation 2 still only featured two controller ports requiring a multitap adapter for more than two players, and they didn’t make any real push to be a “party game” console. However, Microsoft, the newbies to the console business in 2001, did have aspirations to compete in this...
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Collection essentials #580: ESPN NFL 2K5 (Xbox)

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I previously showcased NFL 2K and NFL 2K1 for the Sega Dreamcast. Those were the first games in a new series from Visual Concepts and Sega, and set a new bar for what fans expected out of American football games. Their graphics were, at the time, unparalleled. Gameplay and presentation were similarly excellent.  It didn’t take real long for competitors to start taking big shots at the new high bar. In particular, once the extremely popular Madden series hit the PlayStation 2 for the 2000-2001 season, 2K had a very worthy opponent. For a few years in a row, both franchises would pump out a quality new football game and be greeted with highly positive review scores and great sales numbers. The early 2000s were arguably the best era for sports video games in history up to this point, as there was both a high quantity and quality of titles available for whatever spot you were interested in. You’ll notice I skipped a few years. So what is special about ESPN NFL 2K5 in particular? Well, ...
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Collection essentials #579: Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO (Xbox)

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Retro gamers may be surprised to find that this is the first time in the history of this blog that I’ll have talked about SNK. Before talking about this game, I’d better briefly give some background about them. SNK was one of the notable companies of the arcade era, coming to prominence in the 1980s, and making both arcade and console games. They are probably best known for their innovative “Neo Geo” hardware. They created and sold Neo Geo arcade cabinets which were unusual because they weren’t dedicated to one singular game. The cabinets were compatible with games produced on a cartridge, and each one had a few slots to insert multiple games at once, allowing players to switch between games. This proved convenient and economical for arcade operators, because they could have more games playable in their arcades with fewer cabinets taking up space, plus they could buy and swap in new cartridges without having to move any big heavy cabinets. It was a pretty neat idea. SNK also produced a...
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Collection essentials #577 & #578: Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 1 (Xbox) & Vol. 2 (PS2)

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If you’ve read a lot of my earlier blog posts, you’ll remember that Capcom was a name that came up a LOT. They were one of the greatest and most prolific developers for a couple decades starting in the 1980s. I think of them, Konami, Nintendo and Sega as the “big four” developers of that era who were incredibly prolific and made great games for a variety of different genres. Capcom really made a name for themselves making arcade games first and foremost. Of course, they made a habit of porting their biggest arcade titles to then-current home consoles. One problem, though, was that home consoles almost always lagged behind the power of arcade cabinets until the end of the ‘90s. Therefore, home versions of arcade games were almost always compromised at least a little bit. As home consoles caught up by the turn of the millennium, more and more companies started getting into the habit of releasing these compilations of their arcade games which were more direct conversions and close to perf...
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