Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection

[h1] Decent collection of retro shooters plus Castlevania clone. Simple and reliable gameplay. Hard difficulty and lots of repeating, at least there is quick saving option. Main con is lack of better CRT effects only scanlines are available. Controls are ok, just make sure to set auto fire in the settings for each game. [/h1]

If you're buying this primarily for the Gradius games, get Gradius Origins instead. There's a lot more in there, including optional bugfixes-- there's 21 games in total in that collection after you unlock the bonus stuff. If you want Ajax, Twinbee, Haunted Castle, Scramble, or Thunder Cross? They're a bit barebones in this collection, but they're decently emulated. Don't expect much in the way of extras. You get the US/World and Japanese versions of each game (in the case of Salamander, this means you get the original Salamander and the US version of Life Force, but NOT the Japanese Life Force-- there IS a difference between the three versions and it's substantial.) and some basic achievements. Suggestion: Pick it up when it's on sale around Summer/Christmas because the collection is half-Gradius and there's a new, much better way to play those.

This should have been called "Konami Shoot Em Ups and For Some Reason Castelvania" collection. I got all the achievements in 62 hours and have arthritis in my hand from tapping the key for hours on end. I refused to use the save feature which probably made it harder, but I digress. These games were designed to eat quarters, and many make it impossible to finish if you die because you won't have the necessary powerups to proceed. Others limit your lives and continues. The only reason to buy this is for the achievement score challenges, which are not that hard but challenging enough and fun to figure out because you can look for point exploits and have to get really good at memorizing the patterns. I had a lot of fun coming up with unique strategies and even wrote a Steam guide on the easiest way to beat these games. The extra features are cool but by the end that last achievement popped I just wanted to get away from this collection because I was sick of it. And while not really the best collection of games or even the best collection of arcade games, it was really cool to see the origins of Castlevania and other Konami classics like Life Force and Gradius.

This negative review is just a matter of timing. I gladly snapped this up back when it launched, but now there is a better version of Haunted Castle available with the Castlevania Dominus Collection, and these and more arcade Gradius games will be available with Gradius Origins. It's tough to recommend based just on what is left.

Just download them for free. Konami is just trying to milk us for money. I got this really cheap but it's still underwelming unfortunately.

맛좋은 레트로 슈팅게임이 잔뜩 있다. 나에겐 모든것이 장점. 굳이 단점을 뽑자면 .... 도전과제가 일본어판으로는 해금이 안되는것....

Good arcade games collections! This wonderful time is timeless forever.

Seems to be a relatively nice collection filled mostly with Konami's shooting games. Sure, Gradius Origns exist if you're there only for Gradius games, however for it's cheap price tag it's a neat one to own, I'll probably go for occasional Gradius runs in this one every once in a while. Also, another downside i can think of for this collection is that there are no additional ports packed in. Would be pretty funny if they packed this one with every single port of Gradius, which has been ported to every single device back then and probably can run on anything that has screen, dpad and 2 buttons. Why Konami did go as far as putting Gradius on MSX? Don't ask me, i did not asked Konami either.

Okay... These arcade games ARE old, but they shaped the landscape of modern gaming in ways you can't even imagine. These machines ate more quarters than a hot slot straight out of Las Vegas, and with good reason. For their time, they were revolutionary, and should be experienced in my opinion. Try for yourself, and you judge...

If you can get it for a 5 spot, sure why not. Pretty good ports of Gradius 1, 2 and LifeForce. The rest are whatever (I feel like NES Twinbee is better) These games take a lot of tweaking to play right. I had to disable steam overlay to get the controller to play nice and the display options (and presentation in general) are really strange. Honestly I'm comparing this with an older Konami collection on the GBA that had Pooyan, Yie-ar Kungfu and Time Pilot (plus a bunch of others). Konami mentions them in the in game "bonus booklet" but I mean just throw them in why don't ya..