Platform: PS2 | Developer: Capcom | Publisher: Capcom | Released: April 2007 | 60Hz: Yes | Prog-scan: Yes

Retro collections. Under 21s need not apply. They've been coming and going for quite a few years now. First starting with the odd nostalgic compilation or three popping up on PSone and SEGA Saturn. Indeed, Capcom took it's first baby-steps into cataloging it's older library of games with a few such released on those particular consoles. It was with the PS2/GC/Xbox that the whole 'retro compilation' thing took off, though. Most of the old, established companies were scrabbling to release their back-catalogs onto neat little packages of nostalgia, and therefore, joy. Atari have got a few, as have Namco, SEGA, and Capcom, and probably others that I can't recall. These collections have usually been pretty cut-and-dry affairs. Doing exactly what they say on the tin. Looking at the Namco Museum, it's quite clear what it is, and what it's offering. That very same notion applies to Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2. It is what it is.

There's lots to like about this package, so I'll just get the bad stuff out the way first, and then spend the rest of the review basking in the glory of Volume 2. The problem has often been that, these compilations have often been missing what fans consider to be key-titles. The most recent case of this being SEGA's total omission of the Streets of Rage series from their Megadrive collection. Clearly, the SOR series was an absolutely pivotal series in the Megadrive's timeline, and one of the standout series of gaming history. It's these sort of oversights, and the general fact that the people these things are aimed at are the sort of hardcore, nit-picking, stubborn scum that can never be fully pleased, anyway. They'll always find something to moan about. Indeed, the fact that Capcom split their 'Classics Collection' into two volumes is something these people moan about. While that's not a complaint that's to be ignored, it didn't really bother me. The first volume had a poor showing in PAL territories anyway, with crappy 50Hz, and no 60Hz option. And the overall quality of the product was lower than Volume 2, with pants emulations of the already crap PSone ports of Street Fighter II, SFII Champion Edition, and SFII Turbo, which were plagued with wholly-unnecessary loading times (the whole games fit easily into the PS2's system RAM, so why the need to load fights, etc?).

Anyway, Volume 2 is a more polished affair. All the titles here are well-done emulations of the original arcade games. What this means in beneficial terms, is that you're not getting ports of ports, or emulations of ports. Such things, even if done well, port over the limitations of the original machine, which was often not up to faithfully recreating the arcade game in it's entirety. First impressions were initially much better- full 60Hz and Progressive Scan options. Every game has a little biography, art gallery, tips, and even music section where you can listen to that game's tunes, jukebox-style. Though, the latter three have to be unlocked via playing the corresponding game, with only the biographies available to begin with. Each game is really quite customizable, allowing you to remap the controls any way you see fit (thankfully, as the default controls of SSFIIT are really weird..). Each game also allows you to set the difficulty level and all that stuff, which is handy because the default difficulty of these games ranges from rock hard, to near-impossible. They are arcade games, after all.

One thing which really doesn't make any sense whatsoever, is that you're only ever given the option of either having no continues at all- making the games impossible to beat, or having infinite continues, making the usual run of things where you improve yourself at your games to get further into them before seeing the Game Over screen a thing of the past. If you want, you can make painstaking progress through the game, dying every three seconds, continuously.. continuing. So you've got a choice of the games either being totally insurmountable obstacles, or being challenge-less mockeries of themselves. It's obviously to do with the fact that these are emulated arcade games. In the arcades, you have infinite continues, so long as you keep putting money in. Evidence of this can be seen everywhere in the games with numerous 'INSERT COIN' signs flashing before your eyes. Still, it can't have been that hard to put in options to specify the amount of continues you'd like. As it is, it really defeats the object of most of these games, because you don't even have to try to best it- just keep dying. You'll still get to the end boss. The twenty-strong 'tracklist' on this compilation is much more obscure than that of Volume 1. It is as follows:

* 1941
* Avengers
* Black Tiger
* Block Block
* Captain Commando
* Eco Fighters
* King of Dragons
* Knights of the Round
* Last Duel
* Magic Sword
* Mega Twins
* Quiz & Dragons
* Side Arms
* Street Fighter
* Strider
* Super Street Fighter II Turbo
* The Speed Rumbler
* Three Wonders
* Tiger Road
* Varth

For quick-reference (and because there's no way that I'm covering every game here in-depth), I've taken the liberty of bolding the best ones, and making the shit ones underlined.


"But how did you decide which ones were shit, Martin?" I hear you not ask. Well.. it would indeed be unfair to slate any of these games for their poor visuals and sonics. This is a retro collection which ranges from 1986 (The Speed Rumbler) to 1993 (Eco Fighters), after all. Some of these games are over twenty years old, with the rest not far behind. So no, I'm not being harsh on any of them for looking or sounding like crap. Most of the games here do in fact look and sound like crap. That's to be expected (in a way, that's what you're paying for, and what you want to see and hear!). I'm not even marking the ones down that have aged badly. Most of these games have aged badly. There are a few though that, well, they're literally just unplayable. I'm talking about the basic need to be able to be in harmony with your on-screen counterpart. Take The Speed Rumbler, for instance. It's the oldest game on the disc, so I'm loathe to give it too much of an ear-bashing. It centers around this sort of Mad Max-esque setting, where you drive your car about, smashing into other cars, and shooting them up. The twist being- you can get out of your car, and continue the action on foot. Sounds crazy for a game from 1986, and indeed, in retrospect it most have been a really ambitious project. You could see it as one of the sources the original GTA used for it's inspiration.

Nevertheless, the car's controls are awkward at best, and on foot you are a sitting duck. Your little bloke is nimble enough, being able to dive out of the way of cars and bullets. But you can only shoot in eight directions, whilst your enemies seem to be able to shoot at any angle, getting a line on you no matter where they're situated. One bullet, and you're toast. But it's mainly the in-car controls that make this game a bit of a pain to play. It's not that bad though, and you kind of get used to spamming the dodge button to jump out the way of bullet's. It's aged terribly, and you won't spend that much time on it, but at least it's playable. In stark contrast, there are three games on the disc which I consider to be unplayable by even the most reasonable gamers' standards. Block Block (which is an Arkanoid clone) is ruined by shoddy controls (though I think with this one, it's an issue with the arcade controls not correlating well with the Dual Shock pad). They're over-sensitive. Using the D-pad sends your paddle flying across the screen, too fast to really adjust to the ever-quickening ball. You can use the analogue stick to vary the paddle's rate of movement, but it doesn't feel precise, especially with the loose Dual Shock sticks. Again, Avengers is another game mired by poor controls. The game can generally be seen as a precursor to scrolling beat-em ups like Final Fight (though the action is viewed from above, in this one). So you basically amble along busting up hordes of goons. It's just not enjoyable. The game doesn't move well, with extremely staggered animation. The hit-detection is terrible. It's really anyone's guess if your punch or kick will actually connect or not.

By far the worst game on this compilation is the original Street Fighter, though. Which is ironic, because Super Street Fighter II Turbo is undoubtedly the greatest game on the disc. Street Fighter is just so crap. It's not crap because it's old. It's not even crap because it's not as good as SFII. That'd be understandable. It's crap, because it is not enjoyable on any level whatsoever. It's very easy to see Street Fighter II in this game. Indeed, one could see this as SFII in it's embryonic stage. It's got the 'one-on-one' aspect. It's got the 'best of three rounds' concept. It's got the 'traveling around the world to test yourself against the best' bit. It's even got the three different strengths of punch and kick. You can only play as Ryu, with Ken being Player 2 if someone else joins in. Incidental little bit of trivia; this is how Ken was born. The hardware this game ran on was unable to render two of the same sprite at once (or something like that), and so the developers compromised and made a different sprite with a different palette, who had an identical move-set to Ryu.

Anyway, whilst you can clearly see how this became Street Fighter II- it just plain sucks. Why? Because this game has what has got to be the longest response time between inputting a command and it happening on the screen that I have ever experienced in a game.
The first ever example of extreme, unacceptable lag, if you will. You press punch, and Ryu only actually does it upwards of half a second later. This isn't hyperbole. That's literally how long it takes. It is, therefore, wholly unplayable. It sucks. It must have sucked back then, too. It's only in this compilation to show how much of an astronomic improvement the pivotal SFII was. Indeed, next to Volume 2's stonking emulation of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the original Street Fighter is just utter garbage (actually it's just utter garbage anyway, doesn't need to be compared to anything). It's like comparing Half-Life 2 to Wolfenstien 3D. It's that shit. What's worse, the computer doesn't suffer from any of this horrible lag. So in single player, the AI can do any of his moves at a whim, whilst you're left stiltedly-jumping around trying not to die, and hoping to get enough shots in to make your opponent's health less than yours when the time runs out. It's totally down to luck whether you succeed or not, and the odds are much in the computer's favor. I'd easily say that I lose nine matches out of ten, at the very least. It's beyond frustrating.

As soon as there is a second player, that obviously levels the playing field, as you're both subject to the same horrible response time. Still doesn't make for an enjoying game. Unlike the poetry-in-motion that later games in the series would prove to be, versus matches in Street Fighter is the least graceful thing you will ever see in a computer game. Possibly the least graceful thing you'll ever see in your entire life, in fact. You both spend the match jutting from place to place, praying to get more shots in than the other bloke. There's absolutely no skill involved at all. Whoever looked at this game years ago and said "Hmm, this is good shit. We'll make a sequal to this!" had to have been on a strict diet of cocaine and heroin. Thank the lord they had a scag-head calling shots back then though, otherwise we'd never have the revolutionary SFII, and all the great fighters since! That pretty much wraps it up for all the stuff that sucks about Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2, now here's the good stuff. As you should have gathered from the game-list; there's some really obscure stuff on here. Bar 1941, Captain Commando (at a push), Strider, Super Street Fighter II Turbo (and by extension- Street Fighter), you will almost certainly not have heard or played any of the other games on this compilation unless you're some sort of über-nerd. Which is both awesome, and slightly disappointing. I'm glad that there's a load of obscure stuff on here that I've not played before. A) Because that makes the act of paying money for a load of old crap you've already paid for ten times over in the past measurably less sad, and B) I would otherwise never have gotten the opportunity to play Quiz & Dragons, if this was more about 'hits' and less about 'forgotten gems'.


Which is not to ignore the slight yearning in the back of your mind for Final Fight, and Ghouls & Ghosts, etc. They where on the first volume, though. Which wouldn't really be an issue if Capcom hadn't randomly shat on PAL gamers with dodgy 50Hz for Volume 1. However pathetic it may be- I refuse to buy games which don't support 60Hz, unless they're so amazingly essential that they're not to be missed. A collection of old ROMs that I've probably got somewhere anyway doesn't come under the latter, so I stringently stuck (and continue to stick) my nose up at the first collection. What we've got here is not a collection of blockbusting games from back in the day. It's mainly a collection of really great stuff that you never played. It's all aged a lot. That's a given. There's three shit, totally unplayable games on this. The rest are mostly good, with some really good ones, and a few absolute gems. Given the choice (based purely on the selection of games in both), I would not choose Volume 1 over this one. The games here are emulated better (arcade-perfect to my eyes and ears), are sourced from the original arcade units (rather than the PSone ports and such you got in Volume 1), and are games I've not already been playing to death for decades, and already own on four consoles. There's a lot of scrolling shooters (the best being Eco Fighters and 1941), some action/platformers, some scrolling fighters, and SSFIIT (the less said about the other one-on-one fighter, the better).

All of the games here are at least two-player. Having actually spent a whole night caning Volume 2 with a mate- I can say from first-hand experience that it is actually a real hoot. In fact, it makes most of these games twice as good. We spent half the time laughing at the crappy graphics, and how "They just don't make them like this anymore!", for better or worse. The best game in multiplayer, and the stand-out surprise of the twenty games on the disc, was Quiz & Dragons. We just got tired of playing SSFIIT after a hour or so, had exhausted most of the other games, and thought "What's that?". The little preview video looked awful. We weren't expecting to be amazed, to put it gently. Loaded it up anyway, expecting to just laugh, say "This is so shit", and never play it again. What followed though, you, well.. you just couldn't make it up. You choose between a warrior, mage, amazonian woman, and a ninja. It has some crappy generic story about a tree of knowledge or something, which has wisdom seeds, the bearers of which are granted infinite knowledge. Then some evil bloke comes and steals the tree, and you have to go along a quiz board answering random trivia questions to get it back. It's hilarious from the start- a quiz game which has a crappy medieval storyline and setting. It just gets better as you play it! The game is basically a virtual board-game. You role the dice, then move along the corresponding amount of squares.

This is where the real hilarity comes in. Each square has either a monster, an inn keeper, or an elf on it. Most are monsters, and now and again there's an elf or an inn keeper. Each monster has an allotment of 'hit points' (which increases the further you get into the game), whilst the inn keeper and the elf only have one. The 'hit points' are just a visualization of how many questions you have to correctly answer to defeat the monster. The end boss only has eight, so they're never that many. The inn keeper and elf are just bonus tiles. Correctly answering the inn keeper's question predictably allows you to stay at his inn, and RPG-style, therefore recuperate all your 'hit points' (each time you incorrectly answer a question or run out of time, you lose a hit point), whilst if you answer the elf's question, she grants you extra health, and or special bonus items which allow you to do things like specify the category which the next monster has to ask you questions out of. Doesn't sound too hilarious yet? You kind of have to see it for yourself, but trust me, we were pissing ourselves. To have an on-screen dragon saying "So, you think you can handle MY questions, eh!?", and then see him proceed to ply you with questions like "Who was the lead-singer of the band Culture Club? 1- Barry Manilow, 2- Boy George, 3- George Michael, 4- Michael Jackson" was so funny. All the questions are like that, as well. Either 80s-to-early-early 90s pop-trivia, or questions ranging from science, food, Disney, and a load of other categories.

The whole crapness of it helps. The monophonic, Steven Hawking-like voice which announces each question, to the ridiculousness of the whole concept, to the generally satisfying nature of participating in a trivia quiz with your mates. It just kept us giggling for a couple of hours. We kept going back to it as well- "More Quiz & Dragons..?" "Erm, yeah why not!". I imagine this game would be dire in single-player. It's a social game. There seems to be plenty of questions. We played it for ages, and only saw a few repeats. The questions themselves are of the multiple-answer variety. It's basically like the quiz machine you get down the pub, only with an utterly hilarious setting, and cringe-worthy graphics and audio. It is my belief that Quiz & Dragons is the greatest quiz game ever committed to the video gaming format. It was was released in 1992 (to worldwide apathy), and thus, the questions are all topical for that time period. Some would complain about this, but I think it just makes it even better. Lots of questions about Maggie Thatcher, Reagan, 80s pop bands, Disney films, already dis-proven scientific stuff, and food and that? Get in! It's great. Shit, but therefore great. The shit = great formula usually doesn't work. But with Quiz & Dragons it really does. I mean, even the name.. Quiz & Dragons. The way the game just nonchalantly and precisely advertises it's ridiculous content, and totally lives up to it's title. As if the game is saying "Yep. I'm a quiz- with dragons. What's your fucking beef?". Included as a bonus game, is a hack of Q&D with the old questions replaced with questions about Capcom games. It's markedly less funny as a result. Not really worth bothering with when the original masterpiece is on the disc!


So, what else is there that's awesome about this collection? There's the (as far as I can tell) arcade-perfect emulation of Super Street Fighter II Turbo. For most people who'd buy this compilation, this is a big deal. In fact, there's a lot of people out there who'd buy Volume 2 on the strength of it having an arcade-perfect rendition of SSFIIT. I don't want to start bleeting on too much about arcade-perfectness, the fact that there's no dropped frames, all the little nuances of the arcade version are here- because it's the arcade version you're playing, etc. After the Alpha Anthology came out, this was the last entry in the series left without an arcade-perfect home port (unless you count the hack that was Hyper Street Fighter II). Well, the abominable first entry in the series has never received an arcade-perfect port before either, but who cares about that? SSFIIT is the most refined version of the fighting game that defined the genre. It's so great that it's still played competitively in tournaments to this day, sixteen years down the line! While Street Fighter II's umpteen revisions and updates was the butt of many jokes, it can't be denied that the resultant Super Street Fighter II Turbo is one of the most streamlined and balanced fighters ever. Even today. For every action, there is a reaction. Don't get me wrong- it looks it's age. Still plays like a dream, though.

It's absurd that it's taken this long for it to come to a home console completely intact, perfect with no loading times, when it's far more demanding sequel Street Fighter III had the honour years ago on the Dreamcast. Capcom said it'd be the best home version of SSFIIT yet, and as far as I can tell, they weren't lying. It's the arcade version, well-emulated. It's certainly the best version I've played. Shits all over the crappy SNES ROM that you get on the Wii VC. The production value of this compilation is really good. The main menu where you select your game displays the year and genre of each game, and a little preview video of them as you highlight each one. Along with the already-mentioned biographies, tips, galleries and that, there's unlockable cheats for each game. There's an awesome SSFIIT tutorial video, with some competition-level player giving you pointers. It ends up going into really in-depth strategies. You can do save-states in every game, so no longer any need to plough through them in a single sitting. Great stuff. The general attention-to-detail here is quite high. It's a high-quality product. The selection of games is initially baffling, but eventually more rewarding than the previous volume's. There's other things I like about this collection, though. Less to do with the game itself really, but more to do with the way things are going these days, and why I appreciate compilations like this. To put it in layman's terms- on the Wii VC, PSN, or XBLA, you'd pay a tenner for two or three of these games (the VC is the worst value-for-money). On this disc, you get twenty for a tenner (or £14.99 in some places, still a cracking deal though).

In fact, that is what I love most about Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2- I bought it just for SSFIIT, Captain Commando, and 1941. I verily got those games, and got what I considered to be my ten pound's worth because of the arcade-perfect renditions I got. But there was all these other games I would never have 'took a chance on' on VC, XBLA, or PSN. To think, I would have never played Quiz & Dragons! I mean, you just would never see that on the Live Arcade list at all, for a start. Furthermore, if you did, you wouldn't think to yourself "Quiz & Dragons..? Hmmm, yeah I think I'll spend a fiver on that instead of Castlevania.." would you? It just wouldn't happen. So games such as these would remain languishing on the seabed of gaming history, whilst everyone just flocks to the Great Barrier Reef, as always. I believe that for as long as companies keep making them, these compilations are the way to go for your retro-fix. You get far more game for your English pound, far more choice, and play some old games that would have otherwise remained wholly undiscovered by you, and plus you get to actually hold it in your dirty hands! You get to put your sweaty fingerprints all over the manual and that. Just like the old days! Which, after all, is the whole point. Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2 is easily one of the better retro compilations out there. It's not all killer (volumes one and two could have done with being a single release really, with the first one's content up to the standard of this one), but there's not that much filler, either. It's mostly good stuff, with some really great stuff.