It shouldn’t be this hard to play old Armored Core games
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon has faithfully returned FromSoftware’s Armored Core series to the spotlight. New and old fans are smashing bosses, painting wild mechs, and joking about Handler Walter, and pretty soon, they’ll be hungry for more. And you’d think with a series stretching back to 1997 with nearly 20 entries, that it’d be a cinch to go back and play… any of them. But you’d be wrong!
Playing any of the past ArmoredCoregames today requires using consoles from two, three, or four generations ago: not a single entry is available for download on modern consoles or PC.
You can download and play Armored Core: Verdict Day (think of it as AC5.5), so long as you still have a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. You can also still purchase the original Armored Core on the PlayStation Store, so long as you have a PS3 to play it. But that’s it!
If you’re a total AC convert now and want to play as many games in the series as possible, tracking down a PS3 with PS2 backwards compatibility will allow you to play almost the entire back catalog, so long as you get your hands on physical copies. Emulation is another route in, but that’s legally murky and entails some technical knowledge that new fans of the series may lack.
The simple solution is for FromSoftware to make the series available for download on modern consoles. Perhaps the effort didn’t make sense years ago, but with Fires of Rubicon’s wild success, there is no longer any excuse! FromSoftware sparked Armored Core’s future — now it needs to revive its past.
Read more on polygon.com
