paleface [sys=PS2; cat=Action_Variety; reg=NA] |
| | The second CCC compilation on PS2 is pretty much what was on the first PSP collection (see entry 1055), plus Eco Fighters, The King of Dragons, and Knights of the Round, all of which are pretty good. Plus, now you can play multiplayer without the annoying lag these games have in the PSP versions. The full game list is: 1941: Counter Attack Avengers Black Tiger Block Block Captain Commando Eco Fighters The King of Dragons Knights of the Round Last Duel Magic Sword Mega Twins Quiz & Dragons Side Arms: Hyper Dyne Street Fighter Strider Super Street Fighter II Turbo The Speed Rumbler See the PSP version's entry for details on most of those, and see the entry on Volume 1 (entry 929) for more on how these Capcom Collections work. Oh, this one has menu-based Progressive Scan support, which is quite nice and unexpected for a PS2 game. Now, let's cover those three additional games. Eco Fighters Lovely, colorful horizontal shooter where the main gimmick is that your ship has a large rotating turret that can turn to shoot any direction onscreen. The level design forces you to turn it frequently, of course, as enemies will place themselves on all sides of you. Controlling the rotation isn't too unintuitive with the shoulder buttons, and you can just hold down the Fire button, although you may want to let off it once in a while to get a charged shot off. Bosses are big and impressive-looking, if not particularly tough. Most of the trouble I ran into came from small, not incredibly highly visible, and fast bullets from small enemies. Oh the other gimmick here is ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS. Yay... If you can look past the annoying PCism, though, it's a pretty darn good shooter, with gorgeous 2D graphics, and genuinely unique gameplay with the rotating turret. Oh yah, you can also use the turret as a shield/battering ram, which is fun. You can also get different types of turrets, including one that's just a big energy sword. Sweet!
The King of Dragons Old-style Capcom side-scrolling isometric beat-em-up in a fantasy setting. Two buttons, attack and jump, and pressing them together does a magic attack on all enemies onscreen, at the cost of some health. I always hated the Capcom beat-em-ups where using your big power hurt you... Oh well. Other than that, this is a fun if somewhat slow, fairly generic, and not incredibly good-looking beat-em-up. There are five playable characters, knight wizard dwarf elf paladin or something, nice and typecast. You collect more powerful weapons and armor, which change how your character looks, which is nice, in a small way, and you "level up," although obviously the enemies "level" along with you, so it's really kind of a moot point if you think about it.
Knights of the Round Another side-scrolling fantasy isometric beat-em-up, but here the animation is very much faster and more fluid; it's pretty cool to see King Arthur whip off some nasty sword attack combos. Other'n that it's very similar to The King of Dragons, although levels are more interactive (stuff to break, yay), and you can get horses to ride, woot. |
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| | By hitting certain milestones in the games, you start to unlock "extras," or something. I don't much care to know what they are, but it's kind of annoying to be in the middle of playing something and be interrupted by a bit black window popping up showing you that you just got a check mark for beating a level or hitting a certain score or whatever. |
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| | Oopsie I left the last three games off the list somehow; they are Three Wonders Tiger Road Varth |
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| | The Super Street Fighter II Turbo in this collection seems to be based on the first North American arcade version, which, as Capcom has since confessed, had a bug in its difficulty setting, and basically always played on the highest difficulty, no matter what difficulty level the operator tried to set it to. Capcom released a fixed revision for the arcade back in the day, but for some reason Digital Eclipse keeps using the first, broken difficulty version--they've done so again recently in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. Maybe the first US arcade version was in many more cabinets than the revision, so DE considers it the more widely known arcade experience? I can't seem to get the internet to tell me how many boards of each revision were distributed. At any rate, the single-player in the Super Turbo in this collection is not much fun for me, 'cause the AI just stomps me in the very first match; I'd like to get better, but it doesn't seem terrifically helpful in a learning sort of way. So, at least until the Japanese version of the 30th Anniversary Collection comes out--it will supposedly use the Japanese versions of the games, and the Japanese version of Super Turbo did not have the uber-difficulty bug--if I want some ST play I guess I'll be going to the version in Street Fighter Collection on PS1, which actually has a difficulty curve instead of a difficulty cliff. : P |
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| | Whoop I was wrong about the Super Turbo in this volume having the busted difficulty! I must have been trying to play it on a pad before or something... Anyway, the difficulty is challenging, but I can actually win a number of fights in a row on the easiest setting, so, huzzah! |
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| | The video output is blurred a bit, so even in progressive it looks blurry, rather than nice and sharp pixels. |
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| | I was wrong (the second time : p), Super Turbo here *is* the broken difficulty hard version (I just got lucky on a few matches one time ;_;). |
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| | Okay I think I was wrong about there being a US version of Super Turbo that fixed the busted difficulty setting; the latest US ROM number, 940323--that one comes in 30th Anniversary Collection, for instance--see entry 1595--still has busted, super-hard difficulty. The PS1 and Saturn versions of Super Turbo (I've confirmed this in the PS1 version, see entry 1366; haven't played the Saturn version) DO have fixed difficulty, but according to tcrf, they're the only ones. Other variants like Hyper (see entry 680 for The Anniversary Edition on PS2) may have a working difficulty setting as well. |
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| | Download added: 12_super_joe.jpg (90516 bytes) "Super Joe just blew my mind" "LITTLE KNOWN FACT: THE SUPER JOE IN THE SPEED RUMBLER IS NONE OTHER THAN THE SAME SUPER JOE IN BIONIC COMMANDO AND IN COMMANDO." |
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| | Download added: 13_games.jpg (86930 bytes) "Games menu"
Pretty straight port of the arcade version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, it seems like. Seems to play okay. A training mode! Can't get the dummy character to play as CPU, though--just jump or stand or whatnot. : P You can toggle on progressive scan (480p, instead of 480i), although the graphics remain pretty blurry. ; ) 18 pages of unlockable ST tips full of ridiculous shenanigans to try to learn! = o Also, old VHS-quality tutorial videos! = ooo I was having a hoot in The Speed Rumbler. Guess I'll have to try out that PS3 version (in Capcom Arcade Cabinet). Oh and there's a modern release in Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium... Switching between the games and main menu freaks out my Elgato capture device. : P |
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| | Super Street Fighter II Turbo input delay comparison My previous tests of SF2 were Champion Edition (not WW like I think I said here : P), the Street Fighter Collection 2 version (see entry 1367) on PS1 and the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection version on PS4 (see entry 1368); I counted 4 and 5 frames for them, respectively, at that time. 0:00 - PS3 - HD Remix (see entry 1281) - 5 frames of delay 2:15 - PC - Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection (see entry 1595) - 4 frames 3:25 - PC - Capcom Arcade Stadium (see entry 1661) - ~4.25 frames 5:32 - PC - MAME 0.119 (30th Anniv ROM) (see entry 1656) - 7 frames 8:34 - PS2 - Capcom Classics Collection Vol.2 (see entry 1154) - 6 frames 9:56 - PS1 - Street Fighter Collection (see entry 1366) - 3 frames The PC versions had Vsync off. Capcom Arcade Stadium was set to 59.94 Hz. CCC2 had progressive scan on. After the poor result in MAME 0.119 -- current MAME won't run the ST ROM dumped from 30th Anniversary with the Game Extraction Toolbox https://github.com/shawngmc/game-extraction-toolbox ) -- I tried Final Burn Neo (see entry 1663), but FBNeo wouldn't run it either. Delay in 30th Anniversary was highly variable, from 3 to 5 frames. It was somewhat unstable in Arcade Stadium, but not quite as much. So, the PS1 version is still the best I can run. = D However, it's not the version I'm going to be playing. The Dreamcast version--see entry 679 --one I used to own, but sold with the rest of my collection when I moved 4-5 years ago...--that, when dumped and run with the right settings in a certain emulator, will, it appears, get me 1 frame of delay. |
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| | The games AREN'T blurry in PCSX2, at least not once you turn bilinear filtering and stuff off. The movement in Don't Pull (3 Wonders) feels real sludgy, though--but like Black Tiger feels fine. |
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