Taito Milestones 3

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It’s taken a little longer than expected, but fans of Japanese developer Taito’s legacy of classic games have reason to celebrate with Taito Milestones 3, a third helping of emulated arcade blasts from the past. I hope you like big, sweaty muscles and gameplay dripping with machismo and doused in testosterone, because that’s exactly what you’ll be getting with this collection. Well, beefy muscles and two incredibly adorable puzzle games, anyway.

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As with the previous two sets, Taito Milestones 3 includes another ten titles culled from the developer’s illustrious (and some best-left-forgotten) history: Bubble Bobble (1986), Rainbow Islands (1987), Cadash (1989), Champion Wrestler (1989), Thunder Fox (1990), Runark (1990), Dead Connection (1992), as well as the loosely connected “Rastan Trilogy” that includes Rastan Saga (1987), Rastan Saga 2 (1988), and Warrior Blade (1991).

1989’s Cadash is an impressively innovative arcade action-RPG featuring different class heroes, decent action, magic, and a tense countdown clock. While not the most successful pairing of the two genres, there’s fun to be had hacking and slashing your way through endless caves to beat the timer, which thankfully doesn’t require quarters anymore.

1990’s Thunder Fox is an action-platforming throwback to a simpler time when shirtless muscle men armed with knives and guns could take out entire armies without breaking a sweat. Basically a riff off Kung Fu Master and Bad Dudes (both Data East games, btw), Thunder Fox throws a ton of spectacle on the screen to hide its shallowness, and I’m here for it. Short, but very sweet.

1990’s Runark (aka Growl) proves that even games featuring rocket launchers in the first ten seconds, animal attacks, alien creatures, and baddies hurling tanks (!) can be boring. Despite being released during the arcade brawler craze, Runark is little more than a dull Double Dragon clone that earns points on style but cashes out with dull, uninspired button-mashing combat. I just wish a game as crazy as this would have been more fun, but that didn’t happen.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t really like 1992’s Dead Connection, a strange hybrid of a top-down shooter meets The Untouchables, letting you unleash your inner Eliot Ness against waves and waves of baddies. Even in its hyper-pixelated form, the game is hugely cinematic with fantastic set-pieces and addictive old-school gameplay, and probably the least-known title included here. Short but sweet, definitely spend some time with this one.

1989’s Champion Wrestler: an odd throwback to a very different kind of videogame wrestling simulator, one entirely without any licensing (unless you count the TWF – Taito ProWrestling – as legit) or familiar faces. With its rudimentary grappling and slow-paced gameplay this style of wrestling would quickly become obsolete in the 1990s as infinitely better versions of the sport would dominate home consoles.

Let’s talk about the so-called Rastan Trilogy, spanning 1987’s Rastan Saga, 1988’s Rastan Saga 2, and 1991’s Warrior Blade, a loosely-connected INO (in name only) series that attempted to capitalize off the sword-and-sandal phenomenon of the 1980s, owing mostly to the wild success of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s blockbuster Conan the Barbarian (making this Arnie’s second major contribution to gaming history, after Predator begat Contra).

The original Rastan Saga (aka Rastan) may be Taito’s best-known game, apart from Bubble Bobble, simply out of its ubiquity on various home consoles and computers at the time (my first memory of the game was actually the Master System version). You’ll cut through endless hordes of monsters, navigate treacherous jumps, and slay bosses. Be prepared to die and die often, as spotty hit-detection and unforgiving enemy spawns are here to rob your quarters (i.e. credits). While undoubtedly an arcade classic that’s worth a play, the first Rastan isn’t a game that holds up particularly well, outside of its influential level design and great soundtrack.

The same can’t be said of its sequel, Rastan Saga 2 (aka Nastar), which was terrible at the time and remains terrible today. What a fall from grace this game is from the original in every way you can imagine; ugly, almost disgusting graphics, laggy gameplay, abhorrent hit-detection, erratic level design, and possibly the worst jumping mechanics I’ve ever experienced. The only (and I mean only) things worth mentioning is an odd jazzy soundtrack and even odder voice samples, but otherwise this game is garbage.

1991’s Warrior Blade (aka Warrior Blade: Rastan Saga Episode III) is as big an improvement over Rastan Saga 2 as that game was a letdown over the original. Discarding the side-scrolling platforming of previous games to become an arcade beat ‘em up similar to Golden Axe (right down to choosing between three different characters), Warrior Blade may be the single best game in this collection. It’s far from perfect, with shallow gameplay and bizarre visual and audio choices (written and spoken in English, Japanese, and German!), it was never released outside of Japan until recently.

The two outliers are 1986’s iconic bubble-poppin’ platformer Bubble Bobble and its “sequel”, 1987’s Rainbow Island, aka Rainbow Islands: The Story of Bubble Bobble 2. Without question, Bubble Bobble remains the most identifiable Taito game of them all, with the adorable Bub and Bob dinosaurs essentially the company’s mascots. The gameplay, which harkens back to a much simpler time of quarter-gobbling, remains as fun and addictable as ever, especially if you’ve got a friend in tow. Trading bubbles for rainbows (and static screens for vertical scrolling), opinions vary if Rainbow Islands is an adequate followup to the original game (we won’t talk about the many, many forgettable games that came after), but both games are a blast from the past and serve as palate cleansers for some of this collection’s lesser efforts.

I’m gonna be honest, I’m not a big fan of how these games are presented, and the lack of any real bonuses or features is a little galling. Each game has a single save (sorry, “Interrupt Save Data”) slot, as well as a handful of different gameplay and display settings. On that, the default display type softens the pixels to a degree it’s almost jarring, and I had to manually turn them off filtering to appreciate true arcade-accurate resolutions. There are individual game options for difficulty, audio, number of lives, and game-specific features (Final Boss Continue?), but little else.

Another issue is with how many of the games are named, cataloged, or put into any historical context whatsoever. Outside of digital game manuals there’s not much else, apart from their actual titles on the main screen. This might cause some confusion given the slight variations in how some of these games were named in different countries (Rastan Saga is just Rastan, Runark is Growl). It’s kind of a mess, actually, and makes the whole package feel careless.

Given how little effort was put into collecting these games, only a few of which can rightfully be called classics, it’s hard to recommend Taito Milestones 3 to anyone who doesn’t already have a soft spot for the developer’s history. At least they’re emulated well and play just like they should, and I’d never say no to a few hours of cooperative Bubble Bobble, but given some of the better games can be purchased individually (i.e. Hamster’s Arcade Archives) it’s still a hard sell. I’ve seen barebones collections in my time, but rarely one with the carcass picked this clean.