People don't really like to play old games. People do, however, like to play "retro" games and classics. Retro succeeds because people like to be cool and hip, fancying themselves traveling back in time with their modern sensibilities and feeling quite advanced and superior as they enjoy the quaint and simple pleasures of times gone by. Classics, on the other hand, are enjoyed because apparently, they're supposed to be really good. Claiming otherwise makes you look ignorant and uncultivated. When the rare label of "Retro-Classic" video game is achieved, even someone born in the 1990s that grew up in a country without video games isn't immune to feelings of nostalgia.

Of course compilations like this are really for the fans. Or they should be, anyway. If you grew up playing old Capcom arcade games or have an interest in gaming history, Capcom Classics Collection Reloaded looks like it will be a very reasonable package. Already it seems obvious that this collection is going to have a selection of well-chosen games that look and work properly, and go the extra mile in terms of presentation and user-friendliness.


There are a few big franchises here to act as pillars, a few relatively recent all-star games to attract attention, and a number of older or slightly obscure titles to round things out. Ghosts 'N Goblins and its progeny are well-represented with several incarnations, the legendary Street Fighter II is here with a few of its early sequels and the widely known WWII-themed shooters 1942 and 1943 (which, despite being developed in Japan, star a lone American fighter plane laying waste to the entire Japanese navy). Popular shooting-centric games are further represented by the "guy on foot" shooters, including the influential Commando, Mercs (which actually features vehicles and one of the best explosion sound effects of all time) and the dusty, multidirectional-shooting Gun Smoke.

If you like beat 'em ups, there are two solid examples of the genre for you to partake of. Straight from the 1990s -- the heyday of the genre -- are King of Dragons and Knights of the Round. Both have aged well thanks to sharp-looking 2D graphics. Sharing the crisp and relatively modern graphics of these titles is the 1994 environment-saving shooter Eco Fighters, which features a 360-degree gun-on-a-stick aimed manually by the player. Then there's the figurative loose change, including the slightly obscene-sounding, vertical-scrolling shooter Vulgus, and a few truly obscure (to North America, at least) games like Son Son and Pirate Ship Higemaru.