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Another four games down today. But, sadly, a lot more miss than hit. This is an expensive set, and while sure there's a lot of games in it, if this many games are simply not worth playing, it makes it hard to recommend the set as a whole. Even with the games in it that are worth playing.

Ikari III: The Rescue: I hated this one. In any other set, this would be the worst game in it. But SNK's collection has Alpha Mission and Athena to contend with, and I doubt I will find games worse than those. And I sincerely hope I don't! This one though, it's very repetitive and boring. That's not its biggest sin, but that's one that makes it very difficult to continue playing. You face the same waves of enemies, in particular the "four knife guys", over and over and over and over and over. There's so little variety. Worse, the variety that is there is all about some of the cheapest AI I've ever seen. The orange uniform guys just run right into your face and spam attacks. The hit boxes in this are so bad it's hard to tell if you'll be able to hit, or if the enemy can hit you. And the enemies recover from your attacks faster than you do, move faster than you do, attack faster than you do.. this entire game you are going to be forced to dump quarter after quarter in, and with how absolutely mind-numbingly dull the combat is I can't see why anybody would ever want to do it. This is an absolute failure of a video game, something nobody should ever play.

Munch Mobile: This is an odd one. You play as a sentient car with extending arms to grab items from the side of the road, or toss them in garbage. Honestly, as a score attack game, this could be a lot of fun. But the execution is a failure. We've clearly seen a pattern at this point. SNK makes their games with sections that are nearly impossibly tight, in order to force a game over to make the player put more quarters in. But players aren't going to keep jamming quarters into a game unless it gives them a real reason to. And these games really don't. The level design here is pretty awful over all. A game over will send you back to the beginning of the level, and there are areas where you need to KNOW something is coming in order to react to it in time. Collecting fuel in the later levels, for example, needs to be done at the top of the screen in some areas. So you need to know where the fuel is first. That and the extending arms are fiddly at best. It's a good idea, but there's a reason people play Donkey Kong and Pac-Man to this day, and nobody remembered this one until it was in this set.

Ozma Wars: The earliest game in this set to date, and SNK's attempt to latch onto the success of Space Invaders. And they were already showing here that, despite the fact that they could make a variety of concepts in a game with the enemies, they couldn't help themselves but make them impossibly hard to make players have to put more quarters in. That is clearly the SNK mantra, learned this early on. One of the enemies in particular can sit near the bottom of the screen, throw seeking projectiles out in FRONT of it so it's hard to hit, and those projectiles will stay on the screen so even if you die you'll immediately get hit by the next to game over you. Another one that's just not fun to play.

Paddle Mania: This game I was not expecting, at all. A pong, even air hockey inspired game with some twists. Every other level is from a different sport. Which means your opponents become bizarre changes to the gameplay. And.. it works. Really! It does. I mean, I'd rather play this game against people, but those interesting twists on the mechanics prevent the game from feeling too repetitive. Throwing a different style entirely in now and then helps change things up. I dunno how much I would have put into this game in arcades, but of the four today, this was a breath of fresh air to see some fun creativity on display. -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/the_nametag

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