Data East has a rather odd reputation in the world of arcade gaming. While a great many of the company’s games are classics – such as BurgerTime, Joe & Mac, Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja and RoboCop, the Japanese firm was also responsible for a lot of very average (and very odd) coin-ops, too.
This uneven lineage is illustrated perfectly by the second Evercade Data East arcade collection, which includes Peter Pepper’s Ice Cream Factory, B-Wings, Shoot Out, Last Mission, Express Raider, SRD: Super Real Darwin, Midnight Resistance, Crude Buster, Trio the Punch: Never Forget Me, Super BurgerTime, The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy and Joe & Mac Returns.
Titles like Midnight Resistance, Crude Buster and Super BurgerTime will leap out immediately, but some of the other games included here are either underrated and largely unknown cult classics or titles which are perfectly serviceable but fall short of the standards set by Data East’s ’80s and ’90s rivals.
Let’s start with the positives, though. The fact that this cart includes The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy is reason for celebration; released at a time when a home port was technically impossible, this coin-op action title boasts amazing sprite scaling and mixes Castlevania with Indiana Jones. It’s far from perfect – the controls are often annoying, and some of the later levels get repetitive – but it’s one of those games which everyone should experience at least once. Amazingly, this release marks its home debut.
1989’s Trio the Punch: Never Forget Me is one of the oddest arcade games ever made, and often feels like the kind of game the cast of Monty Python would make, were they airlifted into the office of a Japanese developer. It’s not a good game by any stretch of the imagination, but again, it’s one of those titles which is well worth unearthing, if only to say you’ve played it.
Midnight Resistance is likely to stand out for many people, given the fame of the original arcade release and its many domestic conversions. The issue here is that the game is built around the player using a rotary joystick to control their character’s aim – something which naturally isn’t possible on Evercade. Instead, you use the shoulder buttons to spin your character’s gun clockwise or anti-clockwise, a system which works but doesn’t feel very natural during the game’s more intense sequences (it’s worth noting that save states aren’t available on this title, for some reason).
Crude Buster (also known as Two Crude Dudes) is a zany but loveable side-scrolling beat ’em up and looks and plays far better here than it does in its only home conversion for the Sega Mega Drive. Super BurgerTime is a solid interaction on the original, while Joe & Mac Returns isn’t a platformer, as you might expect, but the third game in Data East’s Bubble Bobble-style Tumblepop series. Express Raider puts you in the shoes of a Wild West outlaw and is a unique – if slightly rough-looking – experience.
The remaining titles are all perfectly fine, if not particularly earth-shattering. Peter Pepper’s Ice Cream Factory is a BurgerTime sequel that ended up being something of a conceptual dead-end, while B-Wings, Last Mission and SRD: Super Real Darwin are largely forgettable shmups. Finally, we have Shootout, which is a relatively fun cross-hair shooter from 1985.
In the end, Data East Arcade 2 serves as a pretty accurate snapshot of the company as a whole; there are some outstanding experiences included here, along with some unseen oddities and uneven game concepts. Fans of the developer (and arcade history in general) will lap it up, and we really appreciate the fact that several lesser-known titles are getting their first domestic release – but there are a few too many bum notes present to make it a must-have Evercade purchase.
Go on.... treat yourself to a new game.
