SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (Arcade) showcase Part 7 Final
3And here we are with the last three games. How well do they hold up to the rest of the set? Well, given the quality of the rest of the set, that's not a very high bar...
TNK III: This game used a precursor to the Loop Lever, it had a control stick that let you choose the direction of your turret while driving in another direction. And for the most part, this game's alright. For a majority of the game, it's pretty fair. Yea there's places that are a bit cheap with their ambushes, but playing smart can get you a good distance through the game. And then comes the latter portions. Where the game shrugs off all pretenses of fair play and just tries to punish you for wanting to play through it. True quarter eater fashion there. Soldiers on the ground come equipped with land mines so running over them - something you're rewarded with health for earlier in the game - becomes instant death. Enemies constantly try to sneak around you and get you caught in pincer moves. That's honestly not a problem itself, but it's a bit of a departure from the rest of the game before it. Still, the game's short overall, so they needed something to extend it.
Vanguard: SNK's Defender clone. And it... it absolute nonsense. Seriously, I cannot make heads or tails of this game. And you can see a lot of places where it is really patched cheaply together. The fact that some sections are effectively destroying a city... it kinda portrays you as the bad guy. Defender was good because the goal was clear. You were defending the place from an alien invasion. Here? Here you shoot stuff because in video games you're supposed to shoot stuff. Not a fan.
World Wars: Oh god, it's a game between Alpha Mission and Bermuda Triangle. And it does the "bullets for air, bombs for ground" thing... on the same button. You can rotate the gun around too, but not the bombs. Which have shorter range. Like Bermuda Triangle, you can collet energy to power up. It takes more to collect to see any difference and you still die in one hit. So this is a less refined version. Also, it shows you early on that you have all of 7 stages to go through, with the last being particularly annoyingly cheap. Lots of ground enemies that just spam bullets at you. And an extremely disappointing end boss where the best strategy to beat it is to simply not move.
So, how is the set as a whole now that I've gone through every game? I don't recommend it. The set itself has issues, in particular the controls keep glitching out which I kept referring to "SNK controls". Every now and then it would just read one joystick at full in some direction, never resetting it. That means you have to either accept unnecessary deaths, or use the rewind feature. I can't recommend a game where the controls mess up that often. There's other issues, like the museum NOT having the English panels to let you decipher some games. Or the fact that most of the games in this are garbage. It's absolutely not worth the high price tag SNK wants for it. -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/the_nametag
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