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