Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2

The first volume took the obvious trophies. This one had to go digging, and that turns out to be the more interesting job. Alongside Super Street Fighter II Turbo — the headliner, and the reason a lot of people bought the disc at all — sits a run of mid-eighties Capcom arcade hardware that most players never encountered outside a seaside arcade: Section Z, Side Arms, Avengers, Last Duel, Trojan. These are games from before Capcom knew what Capcom was.

What holds the set together is watching a house style form in real time. Black Tiger is a coin-op action platformer with armour upgrades and a timer breathing down your neck, brutal in the way 1987 arcade design was brutal on purpose. Magic Sword and Captain Commando show the same studio a few years later, fluent, confident, building side-scrollers with recruitable partners and a real sense of screen weight. Varth and Eco Fighters cover the shooter end, the latter with its rotating weapon arm still one of the smarter ideas nobody copied. Then there is Quiz & Dragons and Block Block, included apparently for completeness, and fair enough.

Backbone's emulation work is solid rather than devoted. The games run, the dip switches are exposed, and there is a decent pile of unlockable art and design material to pick through. What it lacks is the archival care later collections would bring — no proper screen filters worth using, some sound that sits slightly off, and a front-end that treats twenty very different games as interchangeable menu entries.

Playing it now, the value has inverted. Super Turbo has been re-released so many times it barely registers as a draw, while Last Duel and Tiger Road remain awkward to find anywhere else. That makes this the volume worth keeping: not the greatest hits, but the shelf of experiments that produced them.