I really like games that are compilations of other, smaller games. I also like lots of games made by Taito. So when I found a title that promised your ‘favorite Taito games, bite-sized!’ I had to take a look.
And now I kind of wish I hadn’t.
The box was telling the truth. There are tiny, sub-one-minute versions of some… erm… beloved Taito classics. But they’re all just kind of there. There’s nothing to tie them together. You just start one, play it for a few seconds, then start another one. But you don’t have any real reason to do so.
Briefly, this is how your experience with this game will go:
- Start disc
- Choose game
- Load
- Learn how to play game during loading screen (you’ll be here for a bit)
- Play game for about a minute
- Enter your initials (if you set a high score)
- Load the menu
- Go back to step 2
The game does its fair share of loading, which is pretty annoying. What’s also annoying is that you have to enter in your initials every time you get a high score, even during the same play session. This might not be an issue for most people, but my initials are, in order, at the end of the alphabet, at the beginning, and in the middle. So when I have to do that over and over again, it gets pretty tedious in a hurry.
When I said that there was nothing tieing the games together, that’s not entirely accurate. There is a mode where you pick any five games you want and then you play them back to back. Then the cartoon pig in the game will give you an animal ranking, the lowest being a water flea, of all things. I assume that the ‘noble pig’ would be the highest ranking, since the pig trash-talks so much. I honestly don’t care to find out. I played this mode exactly one time and didn’t manage to make it out of the Insect Kingdom.
So yeah, the game’s a dud. And it’s laughably bad. But playing a game that’s just bad enough to be good is kind of what I do. They’re kind of like my personal version of Manos: The Hands of Fate.
[...] past weekend when my local Best Buy had the thing on sale for $20. So, I decided that there were far worse things in the store that I could spend $20 on and grabbed [...]