Taito Legends (PC)

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CNET Editors' Rating 7.1/10 Very good Editorial policies >>

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Product Summary

The lack of light-gun support drags down Operation Wolf, but with games like Elevator Action and Bubble Bobble on board, Taito Legends offers good classic arcade action at a budget price.

Specs: ESRB: Teen; Genre: Action; Number of players: 1 Player See full specs >>

Price range: $4.99 - $18.99

Gamespot editors' review

Reviewed by: Jeff Gerstmann
Reviewed on: 01/31/2006
Released on: 11/10/2005

Taito's one of those classic corporations that, over the years, has been responsible for a lot of great games. The crown jewel of the Taito empire is Space Invaders, but the company's catalog goes much deeper than that. Twenty-nine of the company's arcade games are collated in Taito Legends, an easy-to-digest package from Empire Interactive and Sega. While some control issues get in the way in a couple of the games, the emulations are very sharp.

The Taito name isn't as prevalent as it used to be, but the company definitely put out some real gems in the '80s and '90s.

Beyond Space Invaders and Space Invaders Part 2, the collection contains great classics like Bubble Bobble, Elevator Action, Jungle Hunt, Operation Wolf, Phoenix, Rastan, and Zoo Keeper. There are also some lesser-known games in the collection, like Battle Shark, Colony 7, Continental Circus, Electric Yo-Yo, Exzisus, Gladiator, Great Swordsman, The New Zealand Story, The Ninja Kids, Operation Thunderbolt, Plotting, Plump Pop, Rainbow Islands, Return of the Invaders, Space Gun, Super Qix, Thunderfox, Tokio, Tube It, and Volfied.

For the most part, the games are very well emulated and play just as well now as they did in arcades. The light-gun games are the exception. Operation Wolf, Operation Thunderbolt, and Space Gun all place a gun cursor on the screen, which you move around with the mouse. It works well, but it also makes the games incredibly easy. They get boring fast. Each game gives you a set of options and difficulty settings that set your number of lives and other game-specific changes, and your high score is tracked in each of the different difficulties. You can opt to control each game with just the keyboard, but you'll probably enjoy the package a lot more if you have a decent gamepad.

It's nice when classic arcade games are properly honored with a slightly more in-depth look at their creations. There are a few interesting video interviews on the disc with the people behind some of the more popular games like Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble. The video content is brief, but it's still a nice extra. You can also look at flyers for most of the games in the package.

An online scoreboard would have added more lasting value to the package.

Graphically, Taito Legends has a very bare-bones look to it. The menus are plain but laid out well enough to get you from game to game. The default settings have smoothing turned on, which basically makes every game look as though you're playing it on a blurry television set. You're better off disabling that and enabling the proper aspect ratio setting if you want it to match the arcade originals as closely as possible. In addition to the music and sound, which both match up with the arcade originals just fine, the game's got a bit of decent music on the menus.

The games are re-created faithfully enough in this collection to warrant a purchase by anyone already excited about the classic games included. Operation Wolf and the other light-gun games aren't perfect, but they're still playable. And the budget price is perfect.