You know how good we were eating in the compilation-heavy days of the late PS2? Back on the PS1, we'd be lucky if we got five pre-1986 arcade games in a collection. They were selling three variants of Street Fighter II on a disc and asking you to buy that instead of Rollcage or Vagrant Story or something. Jump a few years later, and we were getting 20, 30, 40 games at once. And with Taito Legends 2, it was stuff like G-Darius, Elevator Action Returns and Puzzle Bobble 2 - Games that had been released as standalone full-price titles on the PlayStation and Saturn. While the masses were trying to convince themselves they were enjoying cutting-edge releases like Perfect Dark Zero and Resistance: Fall of Man, I was going buck wild over Taito Legends 2.
Taito Legends 2 wasn't just great for the late-nineties stuff. It opened the door to a ton of scruffy, weird little games that I now hold very dear. Cameltry, Space Invaders '95: The Attack of Lunar Loonies, Football Champ, and most powerful of all - GROWL.
Can you imagine my delight as I first selected this title, completely ignorant of its contents?
Growl is a four-player beat 'em up (though notably, I haven't owned a version that allowed for more than two players until this week's Arcade Archives release) where righteous vigilantes fight against evil animal poachers. Before you even punch your first baddie, you're offered a fucking Resident Evil 1 rocket launcher.
Everything in Growl explodes. A big man. Chairs. The pub garden roof that inexplicably crushes all the on-screen enemies when you respawn. "SHBROOOM!"
There's an absurd brutality to Growl. Picking up enemies with one hand, as they struggle to regain their strength, and swinging their limp bodies into the ground, back and forth over your head until their skulls are mush. That's what you get for caging a majestic eagle, you villain!
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Growl is actually a good game. It's relentlessly repetitive, irritating, and its enemy spawns would put Heavenly Sword to shame. That's part of the fun for me. How dumb its design is. Minutes before the final boss, the game abandons the established structure and puts you in a spike-filled cave for one of the worst platforming sequences I've ever played. I think this is what some folk get out of Midway trash like NARC and Pit Fighter, but their tone of meat-headed, straight-to-rental VHS didn't resonate with me nearly as much.
Growl is camp 40s kids adventure serials through the lens of early 90s kusoge. A traintop fight against fat Moroccans and American prostitutes. A stampede of cheetah kittens attacking international criminals. A Phantom of the Opera with machine gun claws and a mind-controlling alien worm in his back. Hook it up to my veins.
Rotten game. A must-buy.
Taito Legends 2 wasn't just great for the late-nineties stuff. It opened the door to a ton of scruffy, weird little games that I now hold very dear. Cameltry, Space Invaders '95: The Attack of Lunar Loonies, Football Champ, and most powerful of all - GROWL.
Can you imagine my delight as I first selected this title, completely ignorant of its contents?
Growl is a four-player beat 'em up (though notably, I haven't owned a version that allowed for more than two players until this week's Arcade Archives release) where righteous vigilantes fight against evil animal poachers. Before you even punch your first baddie, you're offered a fucking Resident Evil 1 rocket launcher.
Everything in Growl explodes. A big man. Chairs. The pub garden roof that inexplicably crushes all the on-screen enemies when you respawn. "SHBROOOM!"
There's an absurd brutality to Growl. Picking up enemies with one hand, as they struggle to regain their strength, and swinging their limp bodies into the ground, back and forth over your head until their skulls are mush. That's what you get for caging a majestic eagle, you villain!
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Growl is actually a good game. It's relentlessly repetitive, irritating, and its enemy spawns would put Heavenly Sword to shame. That's part of the fun for me. How dumb its design is. Minutes before the final boss, the game abandons the established structure and puts you in a spike-filled cave for one of the worst platforming sequences I've ever played. I think this is what some folk get out of Midway trash like NARC and Pit Fighter, but their tone of meat-headed, straight-to-rental VHS didn't resonate with me nearly as much.
Growl is camp 40s kids adventure serials through the lens of early 90s kusoge. A traintop fight against fat Moroccans and American prostitutes. A stampede of cheetah kittens attacking international criminals. A Phantom of the Opera with machine gun claws and a mind-controlling alien worm in his back. Hook it up to my veins.
Rotten game. A must-buy.