I’ve never had a chance to play this game up until this year and to say it was worth the wait is the understatement of the century. This game honestly feels like the Fantasia of video games. Everything about this game feels so beautifully crafted and planned out that everything just seemingly flows together so elegantly. If Super Mario Odyssey was a jazzy and loud Looney Toons cartoon, then this game is a brilliantly presented Disney film. The music is that of both childhood wonder and matured masterpieces. The story goes into detail of things I would’ve never seen a Mario game go into, with a character with an intriguing backstory which discusses the concept of death, which is something that hasn’t been done in Mario before or since it’s inception. The games controls, while not as free flowing as something like Super Mario Odyssey, is still certainly great. Even with motion controls, it still feels great to pull of complex movements, and has still aged very well over time. The graphics as well still look delightful. When playing the game on Super Mario 3D All-Stars, it still looks really good even if it’s a game from 13 years ago. The lighting has a solid amount of depth and the animations are smooth and expensive, which surprised me a little bit. Walking into this game, I had absolutely no nostalgia of it. I never owned the game on the original Wii and never bother buying it on, say, the Wii U Virtual Console. I knew the game was excellent but I didn’t understand why people loved it so much. After playing, the best word to describe this game is “elegant”. Everything just flows into another and it makes an experience that is so brilliant and well thought out that if it weren’t for SMO being as important as it is to me, this would be my favorite game of all time.

First off, while this review score is quite lower than others, let me start off by saying that I do think it’s very good. This game is a historic masterpiece loved today by many for a reason and I totally understand that. However, as someone who grew up with the DS version of this game, there’s always been something off about this version. Is it a fun game? Hell yeah, it is. Super Mario 64 is a fun game no matter how you slice it, but I feel like it’s flaws are more apparent to me than others. And yes, I am aware that it’s one of the first games of it’s kind, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt. First off, the controls of this game are fine. It’s tight, responsive, and pulling off most of Mario’s moves is a breeze and is satisfying to do when trying to get a Power Star faster. But the wall jump here is nothing short of primitive, with the lack of a slide when going down a wall making the move far less useful than what is expected nowadays from it. The graphics, while blocky and outdated, have a certain charm to them. Do I think they’re ugly in some ways, totally. But something about Mario’s model is charming in a way that makes it hard to describe. While many complain about the camera, and while again, it’s primitive, the game was built with that camera in mind so it didn’t feel as intrusive as I thought it would. In fact, playing the PC port with the Puppycam was a nightmare at first because the camera just felt so slow, laggy, and floaty that quick camera changes felt like a pain to wait for and lead to some lost lives. The music, while iconic, is a bit underwhelming in my opinion outside of Bomb-Om Battlefield and the Slide music. Not bad, but the series has seen better. My only real issue, besides the game feeling so much smaller than the DS port in terms of extra content, are the bosses. Man, some of these aren’t much to write home about. Some of them, like King Thowmp, are downright broken and are laughably easy. If it weren’t for some of the charming intros they have with their dialog, they would be instantly forgettable and boring. But I think what keeps me coming back to this game is the charm. Mario moves so fluently around that sometimes, I just like to boot up the game to run around for a bit and experiment. This game has been researched inside and out by its speed running community and that’s the reason why. This game, as primitive as it may be, is always fun to go back to for me for a few minutes. Even if I have a few gripes with it, I still hold so much respect for what it did for gaming as a whole that will not make me think less of this game.

It’s sort of challenging to review a collection like this but I’ll try my best, I just won’t go super in-depth with each game. This collection is the one that got me into Street Fighter and other 2D fighters as a whole. This collection contains 12 games consisting of every main Street Fighter game from SF1 in 1988 up until Street Fighter III: Third Strike in 1999, making this an excellent introduction to the genre as a whole. Since there are so many games in it, it’s pretty easy to find a game to get comfortable with. My favorite out of the collection is Street Fighter Alpha 3. While it doesn’t have the iconic presentation of SFII or the advance play styles and gorgeously smooth animations of SFIII, it strikes a happy medium of those two. The character roster is great, the game is fast and technical without being too overwhelming, and the graphics and music have an excellent energy and 90’s anime feel to it (which makes since as it was inspired by Street Fighter II: The Animated Picture a few years before it was released). My only gripe with that game is that you can’t continue in the final battle against M. Bison, which even for the time is cheap. But the package does include save states for every game if you struggle with a certain fight. The worst game is obviously the original Street Fighter, but being one of the first of its kind, it’s not a surprise. The games themselves are all emulated very well, and while the pixels maybe slightly skinny, it’s not intrusive at all. The game comes with online play, but it seems that the servers aren’t nearly as active as they used to be because recently, finding a match takes a while. Other than that, you always got local player with every single game if you want to duke it out old school style, which is more ideal for a game of this nature. There is also a museum section which features a lot of deep cut fun facts and a pretty comprehensive timeline of the franchise up until 2018. Overall, I think it’s a very solid package that is worth the price if you are interested in playing the classic fighters on a modern console, but that doesn’t mean it’s without it’s flaws. While every game presented here comes with it’s arcade release, and that’s what every game should be in the collection, the only game in which I would beg to differ with is Street Fighter Alpha 3. Don’t get me wrong, the arcade version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 is a fantastic game, but the home versions are often superior in many ways. Each home port of the game includes new characters such as Guile, Yun, Balrog, Fei Long, T-Hawk, Dee Jay, and other deep cut characters, the base arcade game is missing all of them. It would’ve been nice if they added more characters but since every other game uses the arcade ROMs, I understand why they did this. Another addition I wish they added in was extra game modes such as Dramatic Battle or World Tour modes from previous games. It probably would’ve been a time consuming endeavor for the developers but I think it would’ve paid off. But for what it’s worth, this collection is an excellent entry point for those who want to either try out Street Fighter for the first time or just want a way to play these classics on a newer system.