Bring on the unknown!

Good morning, dear Patrons! I hope you're well today. It is grey, miserable and raining here and I've had a rubbish few days for various reasons, but at least it's nearly the weekend.

I picked up copies of Taito Legends and Taito Legends 2 for PS2 this week, and I've been having an absolute blast exploring them. And they got me thinking about my changing attitudes towards this sort of thing over time.

Back when the PS2 was "current", I very much enjoyed arcade compilations, particularly the Midway Arcade Treasures series — but there was a condition: I only really felt like I truly enjoyed compilations like this where I actually remembered the games in question. Not necessarily remembering having played them, mind you; just remembering their existence, seeing them in magazines and suchlike. I found it fun to revisit games that I played in my youth — and exciting to play games that I'd always wanted to play, but for one reason or another had never had the opportunity to.

What this meant in practice, though, was that I would tend to pass up compilations such as Taito Legends largely because the vast majority of games in the collection were titles that I wasn't familiar with for one reason or another. Perhaps they were too new — arcades were never really a big thing over here, and by the time the PS2 was around, they were all but completely dead, so it was very rare to see mid to late '90s arcade machines — or perhaps they were simply games that I'd never come into contact with. Either way, the fact that I'd look through the list of games on the back of the Taito Legends cases and think "I only remember two or three of these at most" would put me off taking the plunge.

Nowadays, however, my outlook is completely different. Now, I relish the opportunity to try out things that I've never come across before. I absolutely love stumbling across a game that I'd previously been unaware of and discovering it's exactly the sort of thing I enjoy. And even with the titles I don't enjoy all that much, I can usually find something interesting about it, even if it's not personally to my taste.

The individual games in the Taito Legends compilations are ripe for future articles on MoeGamer, so I'll refrain from going into too much detail here, but I wanted to highlight a few titles in particular that have stood out since I first booted up the Taito Legends discs — games that were previously unknown to me, but which became firm favourites within the space of less than five minutes each.

First up is Puchi Carat, which I vaguely remember seeing on shelves in the PS1 era, but never played or indeed knew anything about. Turns out it's a weird combination of Breakout and Bust-a-Move, featuring patterns of gems hanging from the top of the screen which you have to break by bouncing a ball back at them. Like in Bust-a-Move, you can knock down huge chunks of gems at the same time by removing any gems that are attaching them to the ceiling of the play area, and this is how you attack your opponent in the 2-player mode.

The main attraction in Puchi Carat is the enormous, beautifully animated character sprites that sit in the background of the play area, reacting to what you do. These are a glorious combination of late '90s anime style and pixel art, which tickles me in all my happy places, particularly when it comes to Perydot. Mmm, Perydot.

Um, anyway. That's Puchi Carat, then, which I like so much I ordered a copy of the PS1 version to complement the arcade version in Taito Legends 2.

Also of particular note was Cleopatra Fortune, which I realised I'd actually already recently purchased for PS1, though again I believe there are a few differences between the arcade and home versions.

Cleopatra Fortune is an unusual falling-block puzzle game in which you clear things from the screen by either enclosing "treasure" objects completely with stone blocks, or by forming complete Tetris-style lines of the same type of object.

It's a solid puzzle game that I like a lot, but the thing that truly tipped me over the edge from "like" to "love" was the wonderful music by Taito's sound team Zuntata. Have a listen; it's quite something.

Between the two compilations, there's a ton of excellent games that are prime fodder for the Puzzler and Shmup Essentials columns in particular, but there are others I definitely want to find an excuse to write about too, so I anticipate there will be some sort of Taito Essentials column added to the mix in the near future!

Anyway. I'll leave that there for now, but look out for some articles and videos relating to this Taito awesomeness in the near future. And don't waste too much time looking for Perydot artwork…

Thanks again for all your support of what I'm doing with MoeGamer! It really is appreciated. Please continue to enjoy my articles and videos, and share them with friends, family and followers if you think they might appreciate them. And feel free to drop me a comment or message here or on MoeGamer itself; it's always great to hear from people 🙂

Take care of yourselves and have a lovely weekend.