Some things should just be left as fond memories...

User Rating: 5.4 | Konami Classics Series: Arcade Hits DS
It didn't take but a few minutes to go through the list of games included in this collection to realize that there just wasn't enough to validate paying $30 for this collection. Luckily I found it for $20 at Best Buy and had a $5 coupon so I only paid $15 in the end. Even still, it wasn't what I was expecting,,,I wanted this to be as great as the Capcom Classics collections and hopefully better than (if not on par with) the Namco Collection or Midway's Extended Play on PSP. Boy was I wrong.

It seems that Konami was better suited to the home console market. That's obviously where they shine because there wasn't a single title in the collection that made me want to keep at it until I reached the end for the classic "Congratulations! Game Over" screen. I understand that these are retro games from the 80's, but damn...I don't remember these titles being that hot back when I was a kid. Yes, I am old enough to have played these titles when they were fresh in what we used call back in the day "arcades". People would gather around the cabnet to watch some punk kid trying to get the high score on Ms. Pac-Man, or wait for their turn to show the crowd what they were made of in Street Fighter 2 or Mortal Kombat, but you never saw that kind of love for Circus Charlie or Time Pilot. Sure they got played, but let's face it...Galaga and Rally-X were much better games. It's not that the games were ALL bad...just most of them. The biggest problem was that there were no improvements to the titles. The controls were just as bad as I remembered them from the arcades, and why the hell could you only continue a few times in Contra before it gve you no more options to continue? There should have been some sort of update to all of these titles to keep the nostalgia but brush away the dust

Overall, it's not a bad collection of nostalgia, but this is not a collection worth having on your shelf. In fact, I was scratching my head 20 minutes after I popped it in my DS wondering which of 4 or 5 games did I want to play...and I'm not talking about titles in the collection. For those who loved Yie Ar Kung Fu and Scramble, this may be the collection for you. If you weren't old enough to remember these titles, never dropped a quarter into Rus N' Attack, or thought tha Contra was a NES game that everyone talked about but you never played, just continue to buy Konami's other fine products. For the rest of you, find it cheap or find other alternatives to this collection. Konami should seriously consider a NES Greatest Hits Collection...that I would pay $30 for.