Beat'Em Up Collection Review (Switch)

We love QUByte games here at Retro 101. It’s great when compilations and older releases are brought to new consoles and QUByte have a knack for picking games just outside of the mainstream to do it with. These tend to be less popular releases from the past but it’s great so many hidden gems are given a new life.

This time they are back with a collection of belt scrolling and platform beat’em up games. And it so happens that two of the games on here are two of our favourites from yesteryear. Before we get to that though, there are seven games compiled here in total and most have been released by QUByte is some form before.

The First and Second Samurai have already been released as a duo, as have Iron Commando and Legend. Though releases were very bare bones in terms of quality of life though. This just brings them together in a bigger package and adds proper quality of life features such as rewinds. cheats and a small host of extras such as the original manuals. The screen display has been much better optimised as well with the games adjusted to take up more on-screen space.

We’ll start with the filler, The Second Samurai is an incredibly basic game that really adds nothing to the collection. It is also not a patch on the first game and employs a more arcade style, scrolling beat’em up mechanic. Sword of Sudan is also dreadful. A slow moving, jerky game that most people will play for minutes. It did raise a chuckle that in the trivia for the game it says it wasn’t highly regarded on release for the Mega Drive and there’s a better Amiga version available. Full marks for honesty at least.

The rest of the compilation fairs much better though. The First Samurai is a hugely underrated platform action game. You control a samurai and leap around levels that scroll in all directions looking for bells which help to remove obstacles such as flames or waterfalls then take on an end of level boss. The Amiga version is the best, but we’ll let it go that we have the SNES version here as it’s the one we played when we were younger. It’s been smoothed out nicely as well with the flickering and slowdown present in the original all but gone, add in the quality of life features and this really is a great fun game that more people should play.

There are two solid belt fighters here as well. Gourmet Warriors is bright and colourful and gives you three characters to pick from. It doesn’t have the biggest range of moves but then these games rarely do. Enemies are varied and it runs at a good pace, it also has some unique tricks such as being able to summon a helper character for yourself which conjures a clone that the computer controls to aid you. Iron Commando is a game we have come across before on the Piko 1 collection for the Evercade. It’s also big and bold and creates a good sense of destruction and chaos. We will say though that having the rewind option and the ability to add cheats if required turned it into a far more enjoyable experience as it’s a bit of a tough one.

There’s another game here from the Piko 1 collection as well. The excellent Water Margin. Another belt fighter it’s full of great levels, flashy special moves and diverse characters. It even has some branching routes and different endings based on difficulty settings. It’s a really strong game and one that wasn’t originally localised for the west.

Our favourite game on the collection though is Legend. This a SNES game that we have a lot of fondness for. It’s closest in style to something like Golden Axe or the Capcom Dungeons and Dragons fighting games. But it is a lot more graphically detailed than Sega’s outing and there’s a real weight to all the moves. It’s another game that was very hard back in the day so being able to mess around in it now with the cheats and rewinds as a back up is great. This is especially true as there are a couple of branches you can go down, so saving allows for easier access.

Overall, though there are a couple of poor games here the three excellent ones and two solid tiles are more than enough to justify a purchase for retro fans looking to play something a bit more outside of the mainstream. We bought both Legend and First Samurai when QUByte released them on the Switch before, to have them bundled in with the excellent Water Margin just makes this a no brainer and we hope this generates enough interest to keep these sorts of titles coming.

Overall 8/10

Top Racer Classic Collection Review (Switch)

We love QUByte Interactive at Retro 101. There are so many retro games out there that could be lost to history but QUByte have picked out some really interesting ones to release on the Switch. In the past we’ve had SNES games the First Samurai and Legend, and Risky Woods on the Megadrive, along with a host of others. These games might not be massively well known but they are solid and interesting titles that deserve to be kept alive. The Top Racer games also fall into this category.

When the games released on the SNES in Europe they were known as Top Gear but we can assume there’s probably a licensing issue with that name now, so they have reverted back to their original Japanese titles. The collection contains Top Racer 1 and 2, Top Racer 3000 and a sort of Rom hack crossover with Horizon Chase Turbo called Top Racer Crossroads which is the first game with different cars.

What really helps the collection is that the three main games are different enough from each other to feel unique. There are similarities of course, all of the game display in a sort of fake 3D POV with the camera positioned just behind the car and they all take in race locations from around the world (and galaxy in 3000’s case). Your stye of play also won’t need to alter dramatically between them, but there is enough in terms of look and details to give you a choice to make each time you come to the collection.

The first Top Gear uses a split screen display with your car at the top and either the computer or a second player on the bottom. There’s no way to set this so you only have the top screen so get used to looking at half the Switch screen when playing in handheld mode. Once you get used to it though it’s totally fine. Speaking of getting used to things, just remember the frame rate on the SNES is not perhaps what you remember it to be. There is a sense of speed throughout the games but sometimes it does get a bit jerky. Top Gear 2 and 3000 give you a full screen to race around and each ups the graphics considerably, although they also change style, so each game retains its own look and charm.

There are a few options that players can use with the usual filters here if you want to smooth out pixels and you can play around with the screen size and even stretch it wide screen if you want to. This of course simultaneously fills the Switch screen and creates one of the most distorted pictures ever. Remember, the SNES is not a wide screen machine after all. The games themselves have their own graphical flourishes at times with certain weather conditions like rain and snow and the tracks themselves are well designed and remarkably varied throughout.

There are a few other basic extras as well like achievements and an image gallery for the three games. You can also redeem codes which may suggest future skins for cars. Theres meant to be an online mode as well, but we couldn’t find any games on the server. Whether that’s down to it not working properly or not many people playing the game it’s difficult to tell. Either way we couldn’t get a game.

Overall, the Top Racer Collection is great for people like us. We have played the original games on original hardware and aren’t particularly bothered about upgrades in terms of how the games look and play. We also love the fact that games like this are being released on the Switch. If you are like us, you’ll probably love these games as much as you ever did as they do hold up. If you are a newcomer to the series, it may be better to go to the spiritual successor Horizon Chase Turbo.

Overall 7/10

Visco Collection Review (Switch)

Retro collections are becoming more and more common on the Switch and it has now reached the point that more niche and obscure titles are getting their chance to shine. Pixelheart have previously acquired the license for a host of Visco products and have published sequels to a few of them such as Andro Dunos 2 and Ganryu 2 (which we have previously covered). This though is the first time they have selected original Neo-Geo titles and bundled them together.

There are seven games in total, and they range across genres. You get the original Andro Dunos and Ganryu games, Windjammers inspired Flipshot and its sequel Bang Bead, a vertical shooter called Captain Tomaday, Goal!, Goal! Goal! and rally game Neo Drift Out. It’s a varied bunch of somewhat lesser known and obscure Neo Geo titles. If we are honest, it’s also a little on the light side and a few more games to round out the package would have really pushed this to the next level. But what’s here shouldn’t be overlooked.

Neo Drift Out in particular is very welcome as it's the very rare, third game in the Drift Out franchise and means something that is going to cost you a small fortune is now easily available. It plays much the same as the others in that it’s a very arcade take on rally driving. The goal is to complete a course under a certain time limit and then move onto the next. It’s viewed from an isometric perspective and there are of course plenty of hazards and short cuts along the way to learn. It’s pretty difficult but also great fun and certainly one of the high points here.

More forgettable are Goal! Goal! Goal! and Captain Tomaday. There are a whole host of football games on the Neo-Geo and while Goal! Goal! Goal! Is good, arcade, fun in small bursts it doesn’t really do anything to stand out from the crowd. Captain Tomaday, certainly has the quirky element going for it as you are in control of a flying tomato taking on an evil eggplant who wants to take over the world. Its closet comparison would be something like Galaga as you scroll up then stop at arenas that fill with enemies. There’s a host power ups and some fun scoring mechanics but we struggled to stay with the game for too long.  

Flipshot and it’s follow up, Bang Bead, are two games based heavily around the Windjammers model. You must hit a ball back and forth to each other with the aim of breaking the wall behind your opponent. Precision deflections add power to the shots and once your opponents wall is down you can score. There’s a host of different characters each with their own strengths and weaknesses and it’s decent fun in small bursts. The games also have online play which helps their longevity massively. Bang Bead being super rare is yet another reason to be glad this collection exists as well as only a handful of physical copies are out there.

The two most high-profile games on the collection have already been mined for sequels. The first Andro Dunos is a great little game, even if it lacks some of the visual flair of other Neo-Geo shooters. It’s a horizontally scrolling shoot’em up where you start with all available weapons and power them up continually by collecting pods. Knowing what to use and when, along with the chargeable super attacks is the backbone of the title. It’s fast and clean looking and should keep you occupied for a fair while.

Ganryu, is the other high-profile game here and it’s quite different from its sequel. A ninja platformer sitting somewhere between Revenge of Shinobi and Legend of Kage it looks great, fusing a sort of feudal Japan setting with neo-industrial overtures. Its biggest problem is that it’s quite stiff to control and while players can leap around, throw out grappling hooks and use a host of weapons, you can’t dash which makes movement and avoiding certain attacks unnaturally difficult. It’s still fun, but you’ll be wishing it just controlled as good as it looked much of the time.

Overall, the Visco Collection does an excellent job of bringing some of the more obscure Neo-Geo titles to players attentions. The work that has gone into making pretty much all of them available to play online should also be applauded as it was always going to be somewhat of a niche release. It’s not perfect and it could do with a few more games but we are certainly glad it exists and it gives players a way of accessing some quite rare titles for very little money. We would be happy to see more of this in the future for sure.

Overall 7/10