Konami Classics Series: Arcade Hits

$30, Nintendo DS

Teaches: some logic, video game history

CTR Rating: 80%

CTR Review

This is a collection of 15 arcade games from the 1980's. These titles are listed in the manual: Scramble, Horror Maze, Pooyan, Time Plot, Roc'n Rope, Track & Field, Circus Charlie, Basketball, Road Fighter, Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Rainbow Bell, Shao-Lin's Road, Graius, Rush'n Attack and Contra. It is possible to customize a view of the game with several different vertical and horizontal screen configurations.The game features support wireless play, and players can compete with friends in cooperative or head-to-head action, send demo versions of each game to other players, and/or share replays with others via local wireless connection. You can also listen to tracks from any of the 15 titles in Jukebox Mode, or close your system and listen to a random selection of music with headphones.In short, this package does it's best to milk these old titles for all their worth. As you might expect, some are better than others. The few we tried were addicting. This title could be used in a game design class. Tester (Jon, age 18) said, "It has a few good games, but most aren't worth buying this game for. Picking out which game you want to play is easy, but certain aspects of starting the game are annoying. One good thing is you can easily exit the game you are playing." Caleb, age 9 said "it is a little hard to use and the controls are confusing; plus the graphics were not very good, but there were lots of games."