Taito Legends – Review

Ahh those were the days, down to the bowling alley on a weekend, a pocket full of change burning a hole in your pocket; or off to the local arcade a few years later, which you ran, so had the machine keys, this was gaming heaven. I always feel for the post modern gamer because they’ve missed whatever magic it was that those days held and they’re never going to know them. Sure they’ll get excited about the latest GTA title, or squeal with joy as the latest FPS hits the shelves, but they’ll never know true un-bastardized gaming magic. Shame.

Taito Legends brings together many of the taito arcade classics all on one healthy compilation. I’ve been stung before with these sorts of titles and I’ve splashed out only to find 2 or 3 games that I’d ever play and the rest being non loaders, games that I never even saw and I ran an arcade. Taito Legends differs from these other compilations because this title has loads of great games that truly do deserve the ‘legend’ moniker. Old school gamers will recognize most of the titles herein, from space Invaders, Bubble Bobble, to the brilliant Rainbow Islands.

Graphically it’s pointless to start talking frame rates etc because what you have here is old school sprites, there’s no character modeling, no shading, lighting… but who cares? This is the point, these games are shown as was and that’s part of the joy, they’re all perfectly recreated. So with that in mind the graphics are good because the recreation of these classics is spot on, the only difference really being you don’t need to insert our coins when prompted, you just need to press the button, ahh if only things had been this easy back in the day. I love the fact arcade cabinets are used in the choose game menu and if you’re like me you’ll just wish you owned a few of the real deal, still, a sweet little addition.

Sound, like graphics does not feature full on 5.1 ear blasting dramatically correct explosions, nor does it include a full orchestral backing track, what you have here is the bleeps and synthesized sounds of the era, all perfectly reproduced. All that’s missing is the spotty teens and change booth. One of the audio highlights on this package has to be Operation Wolf, see if you can play it without cracking a smile, I dare you, it’s hilarious in its gut-wrenching wounded agony.

Girl Gamers, this, ironically was a time when gaming truly was more of a guy thing than a girl thing and in some strange twist of fate the player for the most part was fairly genderless as were the onscreen playable characters. It’s an odd thing really that now as female gamers allegedly make up almost 50% of the paying customer that playable characters are no longer genderless and that if there is going to be no choice, you’re almost always going to be playing a male character. But the genderless games on compilations like this just show that you don’t need a character, male or female to have a great playable game. Moving a baseship or colored dinosaur can be just as much fun and in many ways better. But we rarely see this now, because gaming is slowly becoming more interactive movie that ‘game’ in the old school sense and with it come more realistic characterization in an attempt to put the player in the fray, here’s hoping on the next generation consoles we’ll see 50% of those in the fray are female and that 100% of them give you the choice. You can’t take it half way.

Overall Taito Legends is a great collection of classic games, sure there’s a couple of duff titles, but overall majority of them are fantastic and I wholly recommend it to anyone, particularly those of you that know it isn’t all about polygon counts, that sprites still have the power to amuse and entertain. With games like New Zealand Story, Bubble Bobble, Space Invaders, Rainbow Islands, Elevator Action, Operation Wolf, Volfied and many more I challenge anyone not to get a glint of glee in their eye and sit flicking through these titles for some time, every so often stopping for ‘just one rose colored try’ of an old favorite from their youth.

Games Listing:
Battle Shark, Bubble Bobble, Colony 7, Continental Circus, Electric Yo-Yo, Elevator Action, Exzisus, Gladiator, Great Swordsman, Jungle Hunt, New Zealand Story, Ninja Kids, Operation Thunderbolt, Operation Wolf, Phoenix, Plotting, Plump Pop, Rainbow Islands, Rastan, Return of the Invaders, Space Gun, Space Invaders, Space Invaders part II, Super Qix, Thunderfox, Tokio, Tube It, Volfied, Zoo Keeper.

Review by Angela