Taito Legends

[Afterbirth]

Well CC wasn't on the Jap release versions i have. Count yourself lucky!
AFAIK those two were the only two. Sadly.
Theres so much other stuff they could exploit.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Er, can somebody help me out here? When you switch the screen option so that the games are displayed at their proper aspect ratio (which really should have been the default setting), the ones that are designed for vertical monitors have a seriously distracting purple background at the sides.

Is there any way to turn this off and just have the unused portion of the screen be black? That's how the screenshots on the back of the box show them, after all. If not, I'm going to be annoyed - the purple **** is dead offputting.

[E. Randy Dupre]

I take it that's a "no", then.

Just going back to the argument about the Rainbow Islands music, I've got to admit that I do find one thing slightly odd. When Acclaim released the Saturn and PS versions, they kept the the original music's bassline, rhythm and all that, only removed the offending melody and wrote a new one to fit in with the rest of the score. And, to be honest, I prefered that version of the music to the arcade original, which always sounded out of tune, to my ears.

But all Empire have done here is remove the melody, not put anything in its place. You can hum both the arcade original and the Saturn version soundtrack over the top of it perfectly. Why not just go with the music from the Sat conversion? It would have been preferable to this.

[Big Seany]

Got this yesterday (thanks, Kubrick!).

Gave it a good couple of hours last night - and in conclusion:

1) I prefer the Saturn/PS1 versions of Bubble Bobble. I am not going to dissect the physics of bubble movement and suchlike, but somehow it just doesn't feel quite right. Do they move around too fast? Strange.
2) Volfied is ****ing awesome and as addictive as crack cocaine flavoured Pringles
3) Plump Pop is a hidden gem which was a joy to discover and a great spin on the Arkanoid style game
4) New Zealand Story still looks and plays as fantastically as it ever did
5) Gladiator must rank as one of the worst games of all time

[Widegoat]

I noticed from the the inlay card that Nicola Salmoira has been credited as a programmer. I wonder how much of this stuff is just MAME code running on an XBox. I'm still pissed off at Continental Circus bug. It seems to be an issue relating to how the controls have been parsed. Anyone else had this?

[optimusrhymes]

RE: op wolf - once you clock it and play through a second time, it is much more like the arcade/speccy versions I remember - much faster/tougher and more fun to play.

Although I seem to remeber in the arcade you could shoot the little first 4 misson boxes in order to determine which operations you did before the hostage stages.

Also the random 'interception' level seems to be gone - where the enemy clocked you and you had to shoot it out on a static screen, but the upside was there were pick ups a plenty to be had.

And the bit in the jungle where you had to shoot the bloke who has the girl at gunpoint at the end of the level - or was that just the pc engine version??

And as for Volfied I have only ever played the PC engine version and never realised both versions varied so greatly - still a top game tho'.

[Kaladron]

And the bit in the jungle where you had to shoot the bloke who has the girl at gunpoint at the end of the level - or was that just the pc engine version??

I noticed that was missing too. It was definitly in the Arcade version. Wonder why they removed it.

[Big Seany]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but are there any unlockables in this like in the Jap versions?

[buster_broon]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but are there any unlockables in this like in the Jap versions?

nope - nothing

[Kaladron]

A lot of the Japanese unlockables are playable from the start on this one though.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Hate to have to say this, especially after I was defending it earlier on in the thread, but Bubble Bobble is bugged to ****.

Just had a two-player with my sister. Stuck it on Easy, using inifinite continues - just ****ing around, having a laugh with it.

Level 95, something goes wrong. The person on the 1P side can't get up to the top of the level, because their bubbles are going outside the level boundary, making it impossible to bounce on them. 2P isn't having the same trouble, but gets screwed over when five enemies suddenly decide - and they shouldn't be able to do this, as far as I remember - to jump into the tiny safety area at the top right hand corner of the screen and get stuck in there, meaning that whenever 2P makes it to the top of the level, they're killed immediately because there's nowhere else to go. In the end, we managed to get past it by fluking the period of invincibility when you come back to life, but the point is that we shouldn't have had to.

Then, on level 97, it breaks completely. Not only do two enemies get stuck in an area that's totally impossible to reach, the entire game goes so wrong that 2P gets pointsjust for moving. Seriously - every time they even twitch the d-pad, their score rockets. Worse still (if it can get worse), we could have just sat there, moving the pad backwards and forwards to beat the world record score, because the 'Hurry Up!' message never appeared - we were sat on the level for about ten minutes waiting for it, but in the end we just turned the console off.

So they've totally borked one of the main reasons for buying the pack. I take back my earlier comments.

[Il Postino]

Originally posted by: seany1979
Gladiator must rank as one of the worst games of all time

Read me...
Moving on, did nobody like Gladiator/Golden Castle, etc? I really enjoyed this game back in the good old days. Nice sound FX, breaking enemy weapons (hello, Soul Edge) and smashing enemy armour (hello, Fighting Vipers). **** it isn't going to make it in to any top fives, but it's a pretty solid mid-eighties arcade game. For the record, the Elite conversion (only released as part of a "bargain" compilation) stank of the white weewee.

If this hadn't happened, then we may not have seen Street Fighter, think on gypsy boy.

[Kubrick]

Randy, that's ****ed-up. I'd like to say the JP version doesn't do that, but I've never been to level 95 to find out. I guess someone would've noticed by now though...

So, that's 2 games which are possibly broken - the other being Continental Circus (never experienced the bug myself), plus Operation Wolf seems to have some issues.

What about Rainbow Islands - anyone finished that to see if there's anything wrong with it?!

[E. Randy Dupre]

if anyone wants to ask a question or two to the developers, let me know asap (via pm will probably be the best bet)

Yeah. Ask them why they felt it necessary to ditch the fully-working Japanese release and create their own, ****ed up version instead. Ask them if they bothered playtesting the thing.

Seriously.

You could also ask them why they felt it necessary to put anti-aliasing in, or whatever it is they've used to try and smooth the graphics, when these games were never meant to be viewed that way. Did they really think anybody with an interest in this pack would prefer to see the games looking like they were running behind a glaze of margarine? Why couldn't they have included the option to turn it off?

Why no options for defining the controls (I've done a complete 180 on this, too, after finding Thunderfox completely unplayable because of them)?

Why such a half-arsed package, really. I mean, the 'Hints and Tips' screen for Rainbow Islands - one of the most secrets-heavy platformers ever - doesn't even mention the existence of the secret islands. In most other games, this section only repeats exactly the same information as is included in the 'How to Play' screen, or whatever it's called.

Kubrick> The other thing I meant to mention about Bubble Bobble is that level 95 slowed down to a snail's pace. Really chugged badly. I also noticed something dead weird with the jumping, but it's so long since I last played the game anywhere else that I can't remember if it's supposed to be like that. I'll check it out in Mame and come back to it.

[Il Postino]

I kind of feel a bit **** moaning about this package, let's be fair, at ?14.99 it works out at almost 50p per game, which isn't a bad deal for thirty half-baked ports (or whatever).

I'll shut it (soon) with my moaning, but why did they have to put the PS2 version on a CD?

I'll be popping back to Game to get the Xbox version, that's for sure, but this kind of defeats the whole point of the exercise.

Also, those Thunderfox controls sure are mighty ****ed-up maam.