Many of these games were built around the idea of movement in any direction while firing in any direction. Granted, in the arcade version of some of these games, they were not actually dual stick, but for all intents and purposes, they play great that way in this collection. I will say that one of the things I really like is that titles that worked better as twin-stick shooters fare far better now than they did when titles like Ikari Warriors got ported over to the NES control pad. There is box art to games I owned and had lining up along the shelf right behind my couch I grew up playing my NES on. Nick: Moving on… Chris is not entirely wrong (at least about me remembering the materials, not that I belong in a museum) – I do recall a lot of these items first-hand. Nick: Are you implying that I belong in a museum? I imagine Nick (at forty two years old) has more experience with these items. At twenty I’m way too young to have ever experienced the included documentation, advertisements and the history of the titles. I read how Digital Eclipse was really trying to take an almost museum-like approach to the curation of these titles, and that really comes through here. The ability to choose regions for the games, play with settings that impact lives and difficulty to even cosmetic items like how large to make the actual game screen and whether or not to apply a couple of filtering options is really impressive. While I may not have been familiar with the actual catalog prior to this, I have played plenty of other collections and my initial impression was that the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection was thought through a lot more carefully than plenty of others. The Switch had something of an odd release in the way that some of the games only became available later via patching and acquisition through the Nintendo shop.Ĭhris: Well, speaking of the packaging, I have to say that the way the titles are presented here is really nice. That being said, I am glad that the entire collection is available right out of the box here. I mean, these are faithful translations of games from decades ago – it makes sense that the overall repackaging of them hasn’t changed in four months going from Switch to PS4. Nick: So, I had a chance to review this game for the Nintendo Switch when it first released, and obviously not a lot has changed here. That being said, this entire collection is going to be something different I can tell. Sure, Ikari Warriors I had heard of – any game that spawns a trilogy is something I have at least some periphery knowledge of. Some of these titles have aged better than others, but at the core of most of them – they are meant to be challenging games because arcade cabinets were meant to eat your quarters.Ĭhris: Crystalis is literally the only one of these games I had ever played before. Conversely I grew up on the console games – I used to rent titles on the weekends for my NES, so games like the Ikari Warriors and Crystalis I was incredibly familiar with. Nick: I had played some of these arcade titles back when I was a little kid (Ikari Warriors), but admittedly there were some I had not played either (Vanguard). They had differing opinions of the games themselves, but had some consistent thoughts around the packaging. Nick grew up on arcade cabinets and a TI/994a while Chris at literally half of his age and grew up in the PlayStation and Xbox era. We will be tackling this review as a collective as well – specifically Nick and Chris, who are two gamers from decidedly different eras. Regardless of whether or not the arcade and NES collection of titles appeals to someone personally, almost everyone should agree that the way that this collection was lovingly put together is impressive and shows how a compilation of classic games should be done. The SNK 40th Anniversary Collection represents a far different age in gaming than what people are used to today, both for better and for worse.

Snk 40th anniversary collection review