Espial - Atari 2600 Review

A shoot 'em up game for the Atari VCS.  Very colorful and flashy looking.  You control a ship that shoots lasers and there is a target in front of you.  The enemies seem to be lurking below the background or in the shadows.  You must line your target up with the enemy ship or ground target to kill it when you shoot.  After about a minute, you clear the level and move on to the next.  When you get to the 3rd level, it gets crazy hard.  Enemies now come at you from behind!  Overall, not a bad game and pretty challenging.  I give this one a 6 out of 10 overall.  Worth checking out for sure.

Ridge Racer V - PS2 Review

Straightforward, no frills arcade racing brought to you by Namco.  This was one of the initial launch titles for the Play Station 2 way back in 2000.  This game is pretty decent and fun to play.  Don't expect it to be realistic however.  There is no braking really required, just releasing the gas and drifting around corners.  There are no real world physics, so cars don't act like they should.  You have to go into this game with the mindset that it is an arcade racer.  The game even comes complete with the annoying announcer guy that makes all kinds of obvious and goofball comments.  The game does get boring however after about 30 minutes due to the limitation of different tracks.  The tracks are basically just different versions of about 4 or 5 main, core tracks.  Overall, I give this game a 6 out of 10.  Fun to play and what you would expect from an arcade style racing game.    

Aero Fighters - SNES Review

Pretty solid shooter for the SNES.  This was an arcade game and plays just like the arcade version.  Typical you versus the entire world type shoot em up.  In true SNES fashion, there is an options screen where you can select difficulty and lives etc.  I found it to be pretty challenging on normal mode and I made it to the 6th stage using 3 continues.  The power ups are straightforward with 5 levels of power that upgrade your shot.  You do however lose a level based on time it you don't keep collecting power ups.  You also have 3 bombs that you start with.  There are giant bosses at the end of each stage that are challenging and I believe I saw a few mini bosses on the first couple stages.  There is a little bit of slow down / lag when there is a lot of sprites on the screen at once.  I experienced the slow down about 3 or 4 times.  Overall I give this one a 7 out of 10 stars.  Graphics and sound are SNES awesome and the game play is great.

William's Arcades Greatest Hits - SNES review

A compilation of 5 games made by Williams and translated to (not ported) to the SNES.  Some people might really like this compilation because they liked these arcade games originally.  I don't really care for any of the games in this collection except maybe Robotron 2084.  The games are: Defender, Defender 2 (Stargate?), Joust, Robotron 2084, and Sinistar.  As far as I could tell, they all play exactly like the arcade predecessors and the look and sound similar.  There is also a feature for every game that allows you to set the difficulty and also the number of lives you start with.  Overall, I give the entire package a 5 out of 10 stars for me anyway.  It might have gone up to a higher rating if there were more games I liked in the collection.