Konami Arcade Classics (PS1) - Longplay
40:00:00 - Opening
0:03:06 - Pooyan (1982)
0:13:44 - Scramble (1981)
0:20:28 - Yie Ar Kung-Fu (1985)
0:29:06 - Roc 'n Rope (1983)
0:32:15 - Shao-Lin's Road (1985)
0:43:04 - Circus Charlie (1984)
0:57:07 - Super Cobra (1981)
1:01:17 - Road Fighter (1984)
1:06:29 - Time Pilot (1982)
1:12:15 - Gyruss (1983)
1:19:49 - History
What's this? I've been uploading videos to here for 8 years and the only Konami games you've seen me play are the Gradius and Parodius games? Let's fix that problem!
...to be fair, I do have a valid excuse. For the longest time, the only non-Gradius Konami collection I've ever owned was Konami Classics Series: Arcade Hits for the DS. But I can't really do videos on that for several reasons. For one, I don't have a DS capture card, and even if I did, the DS model I own is a DS Lite, which is supposedly incompatible with standard DS capture cards. Add that to the fact that I don't want to use emulation for recording compilation longplay videos, and I haven't really had the chance to record any footage of Konami games besides the Gradius games. Well, I got kinda tired of that. So, for my birthday this year, I asked for three games. Two of them were the GBA Namco Museum 50th Anniversary and Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced, and the third one was this.
Released in 1999 for the PlayStation, Konami Arcade Classics is an interesting compilation. As a matter of fact, this was ALSO released as an arcade cabinet, under the title Konami 80's AC Gallery (yes, the abbreviation is part of the name. Also, that's this game's Japanese name). I haven't been able to get the ROMs for the arcade version working in MAME, but I would assume it's very similar to this, production and quality-wise.
With this, you get 10 arcade games made by Konami released from the years 1981 through 1985, with two games from each year. Sure, they're not the same heavy hitter-names you'd recognize from developers like Namco, Capcom, Atari, or Nintendo, but as arcade games go, they're pretty damn solid. Konami's more well-known for their shooters (Gradius, Parodius, TwinBee, Thunder Cross, and the like), their action games (Rush'n Attack, Castlevania, Contra), and their sports games (Track & Field and all its various spoofs), as well as some other titles like Frogger, but they have a plethora of other games from all kinds of genres, and the representation here is, in my opinion, pretty decent overall. It's nothing like the vastness of the PS1 Namco Museums from the same era, but it's still a neat portion of early arcade gaming history.
The compilation itself is very well-made, if not a bit underwhelming in terms of features. Game emulation is, from what I can tell, solid overall, though the sound quality in some games is off, Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Shao-Lin's Road have some timing/speed issues, and a few notes in Circus Charlie's songs are altered (likely for copyright). Since all games on this collection use vertical monitors, the HUD features are moved to the right side of the screen to account for the 4:3 aspect ratio that CRTs use. The games play and control well, and you are allowed to adjust the lives and extend settings. The only downsides I can think of are that you aren't able to view the game's attract modes (unless there's some way to do it I don't know about) and there's no autofire settings (making games like Scramble and Time Pilot way harder). Like with most arcade game compilations, though, outside of the games included, there isn't much more to it. This version does add a "History" menu where you can view brief descriptions and release dates for each game, but that's barely a feature worth checking out.
Obviously, since I don't know Konami games as well as I know the Namco games, my gameplay here is a bit all over the place. Still, I like to think I did an okay job showing off these games (aside from Roc 'n Rope, Road Fighter, and Super Cobra), and I think if I put a bit more time into them, I could put up some pretty good scores. For the time being, though, this is fine. There's actually a secondary title screen cinematic that I only discovered after ending the recording, but oh well. Perhaps I'll just make a separate video for that.
I'd highly recommend this compilation to anyone who has a passing interest in arcade games, and wants some Konami in their lineup. Though, if you're looking for a Konami compilation with a high focus in content, you may want to look into Konami Classics Series: Arcade Hits, as that outdoes this in almost every way.
Played on my Playstation 2.