Arcade Games, Without Cereals or Fillers!

(image from MLSchelps,
with some creative editing)

I'm not totally on board with the Nintendo Switch, but there's one thing I do very much appreciate about this system. It's given us a whole lot of obscure arcade games through Hamster's Arcade Archives line, which previously had been restricted to primitive early 1980s game consoles, or not ported to anything at all. And they're emulations, duplicating the arcade version almost perfectly, without compromises or creative liberties.

How long's it been since we could play Mario Bros. on a modern game system? I mean, the real arcade one, not that silly mini-game in Game Boy Advance games where they pretty up the graphics and turn the turtles into Spinies, just so you don't think you can jump on them like you can in Super Mario Bros. There's also all three Donkey Kongs (better than the NES versions, much better than the ColecoVision versions), and Crazy Climber, and Galaga's red-headed stepchild Gaplus, and Kangaroo, and Exerion, and freakin' Moon Patrol, and Scramble, and golly gosh who knows what else? I think even Guzzler by Tekhan and Pop Flamer by Jaleco are offered on Arcade Archives, which is one hell of a deep dive. While I saw Guzzler in a pizza place once or twice, I can't remember ever playing Pop Flamer before the emulation boom of the mid 1990s.

Most of these arcade games straight up vanished in the NES age, or were given inferior ports on game systems with no hope of bringing their excitement home. The supposed "perfect" conversion of Donkey Kong on the ColecoVision was anything but, chock full of unwelcome simplifications to the play mechanics, and even Defender II for the NES was far removed from its arcade counterpart mechanically. After all these years, it's nice to actually have all these ancient arcade hits in one place, on one game system, without being pared down to nothing on the way there, and without having to mess with creaky hardware that looks terrible on a modern television set.

Are they overpriced? Yes. Nobody should have to pay eight dollars (or any dollars) for Phozon. Could Hamster do more to preserve the arcade hits of the past? Yes. We've got some big names attached to the program already- Namco, Taito, Konami, and even Nintendo themselves- but Arcade Archives is sorely lacking representation from Robotron: 2084 creators Williams and Universal, the makers of the Mr. Do! series. Nevertheless, this is the most comprehensive selection of arcade oldies we've seen on a game console since Wii Virtual Console, and elder nerds such as myself appreciate the effort.