Capcom recently announced a 10 . game Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection, which combines the six Game Boy Advance Battle Network titles and the various versions that were originally released. I’m excited by the news because I worry these excellent spinoffs will never get the kind of revival that the foundational Mega Man series did a few years ago. Many of the Battle Network games currently available only on the Game Boy Advance or the Wii U virtual console are now dead, while others remain locked on the Nintendo DS. However, a large portion of the series will now be available to anyone who owns a PlayStation 4, Switch, or PC running Steam. It’s great to see these classic games on modern platforms, and I hope other companies take note of the conservation strategy Capcom has taken in recent years.
This month we have a great collection of fighting games in the aptly named Capcom Fighting Collection. It brings together the US and Japanese arcade versions of the entire Darkstalkers franchise and other long-running series like Red Earth, Cyberbots, and Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix. Even beyond these bundles, the Capcom Arcade Stadium series (a new installment coming this month) is filling the void of non-combat games and resurrecting a host of other Capcom arcade games. Before that, Mega Man received several collectibles to power the original series and Mega Man X. I’m really excited to have these collections available on my Switch.
One of my favorite pieces of the recent Capcom collections are the images and archives included in the package. Early sketches, concept art, and other important and formal design documents are enlightening. Even just glancing at the developer’s thought process while piecing together these classics at the time was amazing, and I hope this practice becomes more common even in future releases. current game release.
Atari isn’t a name you often hear in its 2022 video game talk, but even it’s trying to keep its legacy alive and playable. The brand is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a massive collection of notable Atari titles from throughout the company’s history. Digital Eclipse is handling the development of Atari 50: Celebration, which includes more than 90 games on six Atari consoles and even some new games inspired by some of the classics. It also features a timeline of Atari’s history, with interviews with key members of the company spanning five decades.
I know everything above makes the accessibility of games mostly in a good place, but there is still a lot of work to be done. There are so many little-known Genesis games I’ve been craving to try, licensed SNES games I’ve rented over and over again, I’d love to experience again. An entire generation of games in the transition from the late 90s to the early 2000s of the console generation felt out of place and was ripe for revival. Even sports titles are like dust in the wind, especially when a new title is released every year. I would grab a Tiger Woods PGA Tour collection in a snap to play through the PS1 and PS2 entries and see how the series has changed and evolved over time. Consoles like the Sega Saturn or Gamecube feel similarly stuck in time even though emulation for these devices is possible with today’s technology. A select few games have popped up in recent years, like Nights Into Dreams and Super Mario Sunshine, but more could be done to preserve those foundations.
Nintendo and Sony have made a small effort to offer games from previous platforms for purchase or play. While some classics have arrived on the new PlayStation Plus or the Nintendo Switch Online service, both are falling a lot short of what can and should be playable on current hardware. Microsoft, on the other hand, has offered many games natively on its console, all of which were released on the OG Xbox, with equally graphical improvements. If every major company started making consistent and concerted efforts to keep their previous generations of games available, like Xbox and Capcom, the game industry and ecosystem would be much better off.
