SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1

Neo Turf Masters sits on this disc next to Metal Slug, and that pairing says more about SNK's arcade output than any marketing line could. The company that built its reputation on fighters and run-and-guns also made a golf game good enough that people still ask after it, plus a baseball game, a soccer game, and a side-scrolling shooter with a mechanical squid for a boss. Sixteen boards, one menu, very little curation beyond breadth.

The marquee entries are the ones you would expect. Metal Slug, Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, The King of Fighters '94 and World Heroes carry the fighting-and-shooting load, and they are the games most likely to pull someone to the disc in the first place. The deeper cuts are where it earns its keep. Magician Lord is a brutally stiff platformer that was the Neo Geo's launch showpiece and plays like a museum exhibit now. Shock Troopers is a rotating-fire overhead shooter that holds up better than most of its contemporaries. Burning Fight is a Final Fight knockoff that nobody needs but everyone should see once. Last Resort borrows heavily from R-Type and is still sharp.

Emulation quality is solid rather than exacting. The games run, the sprites look right, and the save-anywhere and unlimited-credit options strip out the quarter-munching cruelty that defined these cabinets, which is both a mercy and a slight falsification of what they were. Each title comes with a gallery of flyers and art, which is the kind of context a compilation like this ought to supply and usually does not.

The PS2 controller is the weak link, as it always was for this material. Samurai Shodown and The King of Fighters want a proper stick, and the D-pad on a DualShock 2 will fight you on quarter-circles and especially on the charge motions in World Heroes. Playing the sports titles is fine. Playing a fighter seriously is not, unless you have the hardware for it.

What the collection really documents is a company that threw everything at a single cartridge format for a decade and let the market sort it out. Some of these games are genuinely excellent, several are merely competent, and one or two are curiosities that survive only because they shared a motherboard with better work. That unevenness is the honest shape of an arcade catalogue, and seeing it laid flat on one disc is more interesting than another greatest-hits package would have been.