Philly Game Day - March 24th

On 03/25/2014 at 01:47 AM by KnightDriver

Today, or rather yesterday now, I got myself a cheese steak and a German beer and pulled out the original Xbox and dug into my Backloggery Fortune Cookie picks of Atari Anthology and Taito Legends.

That's the game Rastan on the screen there.

It’s weird to boot up the original Xbox and realize there’s almost no U.I. (user interface) to greet you and no noticeable internet connectivity. The U.I. for Xbox looks a lot like the other systems of its generation – just very simple and few options to choose from.

I put in Atari Anthology. This is a huge collection of Atari 2600 and Atari arcade games neatly arranged in categories according to game type with an additional section for all the Arcade games. Each game has unlockable special modes that let you play the game super-fast paced, or with weird graphical effects, or in a kind of timed challenge mode. I found out that you have to get certain scores on the arcade games to unlock these modes for the console games. This annoyed me at first, but then I realized I wasn’t too interested in playing them in special way. So I just went through them in the normal way spending longer on ones I liked, exiting quickly from anything I didn’t, and then labeling them played or deleting them off my backloggery page. Of all those many games, I only kept three on backloggery so I could revisit them sometime later: Adventure, Lunar Lander (Arcade), and Missile Command (Atari 2600 version).

Then I dug into Taito Legends and stayed with that the rest of the day. I thought I’d just rip through both of these collections in short order, but I really got hooked on many of the Taito games playing most of them to the end or just a long time. Ones I finished or just stayed with a while, and then saved on my backloggery page, were: Battle Shark, Bubble Bobble, Gladiator, Jungle Hunt, The New Zealand Story, The Ninja Kids, Operation Thunderbolt, Plump Pop, and Space Gun.

I hope to do some blogs on each of these games sometime soon.

Matt Snee Staff Writer

03/25/2014 at 03:42 AM

does that Atari collection have Solaris? I want to play that game again.

I would kill for that cheese steak.

KnightDriver

03/25/2014 at 03:24 PM

No it isn't, but it looks awesome. Added it to my wishlist. Thanks!

03/25/2014 at 05:29 PM

i used to play that game endlessly. I want to play it again so bad.

BrokenH

03/25/2014 at 03:50 AM

Cheese steaks and videogames=Ben's heaven!

03/25/2014 at 03:31 PM

You betcha. Sometimes it's hot dogs or other meaty foods. Party time!

Cary Woodham

03/25/2014 at 07:58 AM

Taito Legends and its sequel are awesome.

03/25/2014 at 03:40 PM

The sequel has one of my favorite games on it, Front Line. Taito has a lot of great games. I keep finding more of them. I think they are fast becoming one of my favorite game makers.

Alex-C25

03/25/2014 at 11:49 AM

Is Berzerk on the Atari collection?

03/25/2014 at 04:29 PM

No it isn't. I'm not sure why since the Atari 2600 version was published by Atari. The arcade original is by Stern Electronics and that might explain it. Stern is long gone so who knows who owns it now. Apparently Atari doesn't.

It's only been ported to systems from the 80s unfortunately. One recent one, however, is on this iPhone/iPad ap Vectrex Regeneration. Which looks super cool btw.

goaztecs

03/25/2014 at 11:51 AM

Taito man...that's a game comp I'm looking for. After looking at your pic I think it could be time for an early lunch.

03/25/2014 at 04:43 PM

Yo, have you seen these Taito Stations they have in Japan? There's some crazy machines in those arcades.

03/31/2014 at 01:12 PM

All I can say is WOW, those arcades are crazy. I'm not a fan of card games, but I would give that card game in the beginning of the video a try.

03/31/2014 at 07:19 PM

Yea, I've never seen that device before. Did you see the weird cube pad thing at minute 2:45? What is that thing? And what game is that? And what are those machines on the left side at minute 1:50? Weird future stuff I suspect.

04/01/2014 at 11:22 AM

Haha that square game looks like a digital whack-a-mole. At first I thought it was a music game but it looks like the player is hitting the squares that light up. I think those pod games could be a giant screen game. If anything they are interesting.

04/01/2014 at 03:44 PM

That's what I call an arcade. All sorts of strange machines. I want to live in Japan.

Super Step Contributing Writer

03/25/2014 at 12:48 PM

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm .... steak cheese.

03/25/2014 at 04:49 PM

I should've mentioned, this cheesesteak had mushrooms on it too. It was a mushroom cheesesteak. You get like twenty 1-ups for that.

C.S.3590SquadLeader

03/25/2014 at 02:10 PM

That cheese steak looks delicious!

03/26/2014 at 03:41 AM

It was.

I could go down to where it all started at Pat's King of Steaks in Philly. I could go right now 'cause it's open 24/7. But I won't. I used to go with my band some nights after a gig. That was nice.

jgusw

03/25/2014 at 07:58 PM

Taito Legends is great.

03/26/2014 at 04:28 AM

I wish they'd do another one. I imagine they have more games then what was put on Taito Legends 1 and 2.

NSonic79

05/12/2014 at 01:01 PM

Thank you for reminding me about getting thse games eventually mores with TL2. My Xbox could use some more retro love given how I usually play retro during the summer down in my "dungeon" with my Xbox system of choice.

05/13/2014 at 02:38 PM

I got every collection I could find for Xbox (except Midway Arcade Treasures Vol 3 I just found out). Here's what I think is all of them plus the few that are only on PS2:

Atari Anthology
Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 1, 2
Midway Arcade Treasures 1, 2, 3
Taito Legends 1, 2

PS2 only:
Activision Anthology
Sega Classics Collection
Sega Genesis Collection

PixlBit