TAITO Milestones 2 Review

thesixthaxis.com:

It’s time to put on those rose-tinted spectacles and dive into another selection of ‘classic’ games from a former arcade giant. This time it’s perhaps the lesser-known Taito Corporation, a company that originally started in 1959 by importing vodka. Skip forward twenty or so years (and the Communist takeover of China) and Taito released its first game, Elepong, a video game version of table tennis. From there the company grew and released some of the most beloved arcade games of all time including Space Invaders, Mr Do!, Chase HQ, and Bubble Bobble.

This latest collection, as with many such compilations, has some big hits and titles you may never have heard of. The usual features include mid-game saves, online rankings, button remapping, and a host of display settings including filters and wallpapers, and while it’s nothing special on that front, it’s good to have them. Without further ado, let’s take a look at those games which, in the interests of clarity, I’m going to list in order of worst to best.

First up is The Legend of Kage, a precursor to Sega’s classic Shinobi and features a ninja who skips around the screen, climbs trees, and throws shuriken’s around like they were candy. It’s very basic and the random nature of the enemies means you have to be on your toes at all times. Graphically this is the most dated of all the games in the collection with our titular hero having just two frames of animation for walking. It’s more of a curio than anything worth playing for along time.

Solitary Fighter is a rather basic beat ’em up which mixes the one-on-one style of Street Fighter with a smidgen of Streets of Rage as while you are fighting your main opponent, secondary characters may join in and start throwing boxes at your