Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 1

The most revealing thing about this disc is how little it apologizes. Capcom's early arcade games were built to eat quarters, and the collection keeps that design intact. Ghosts 'n Goblins still sends Arthur back to the start of a stage after a couple of hits, and it still makes you play the entire game a second time to see the real ending. That stubbornness is the reason to pick this up, and also the reason many people will put it down.

The lineup leans toward the company's early years, when it was working out a house style. Commando and Section Z sit alongside 1942 and its sequels in the vertical shooter line, Black Tiger and Trojan show the platform and brawler instincts taking shape, and Side Arm, Avengers and Bionic Commando fill out the run of mid-80s coin-ops. Some are classics and some are curiosities. Several are here mostly for completeness, and the weaker ones show how much the better games owed to tight level design rather than raw difficulty.

As a package it is functional rather than lavish. The games are straight ports of the arcade originals, and you can adjust dip-switch style options like difficulty and lives, which matters a great deal for titles this punishing. Unlockable extras give you something to chase beyond a high score, though the presentation is plain compared with the museum-style collections that followed on later hardware. Menus work, and that is about all they need to do.

How it plays now depends on your patience. The one-hit-and-you-are-nearly-dead structure feels harsh after decades of checkpoints and health bars, and some of the older shooters repeat themselves quickly. Yet when a game here clicks, the compact scale is a strength: a few minutes, a clear goal, and an obvious reason you died. That clarity is what modern design often loses.

This was an early sign that publishers had realized their back catalogues were worth selling twice. It also works as a short history lesson in how Capcom learned to build games that were hard in interesting ways rather than merely unfair.