Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced Review

The ability to play as Chain, Buchu, Star, Blues, and the rest of the Yie Ar Kung-Fu gang is enough on its own to make this cart a must-have.

Konami is following in the footsteps of companies like Midway and Namco with this portable release of old arcade classics. Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced features six games from Konami's '80s lineup: Frogger, Gyruss, Time Pilot, Rush'n Attack, Scramble, and Yie Ar Kung-Fu. The GBA translations of these games are, for the most part, accurate, and all of them play incredibly well. Konami has also taken a few extra steps and added link cable multiplayer to a few of the games--most notably Yie Ar Kung-Fu, which becomes a full-fledged fighting game when linked up, giving you a full roster of characters to choose from instead of forcing you to play as Oolong.

The graphics and sound may be a bit drab by today's standards, but they faithfully duplicate the audio and video of the original games with only a few exceptions. The change that sticks out the most is that almost all the music in Frogger has been changed for some inexplicable reason. Additionally, the speech in Yie Ar Kung-Fu is a little more muffled than that of its arcade counterpart. But regardless of these minor issues, there isn't a weak game in the group, and the addition of single-cart multiplayer makes it an even better value. The ability to play as Chain, Buchu, Star, Blues, and the rest of the Yie Ar Kung-Fu gang is enough on its own to make this cart a must-have.

The Good

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The Bad

About the Author

Jeff Gerstmann has been professionally covering the video game industry since 1994.