Title: Irem Arcade 1
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Late 2022
Prelude
Here we are. The first Evercade cartridge to be reviewed here on Seafoam Gaming. Why this one? I originally planned to start with the Atari ones, as the first Atari console cart was also the first Evercade cart, but I feel doing them in a completely random order would make stuff more unpredictable; and fun! Some I have a lot more experience at covering than others, and would be able to get done quicker. Irem 1 was the pack-in with the old EXP bundle, and I argue is the best intro point into the Arcade lineup of cartridges we currently have. So thus, might as well start with a former pack-in!
Since I’d be able to fill up time between my queue reviews with these compilation reviews, I felt it was best to do so at a pace where I’d be able to get a lot of reviews completed to have a nice backlog to pull out of when dryer weeks come to the site. Hopefully you guys all enjoy these sets of reviews!
Presentation
I mentioned how the Evercade UI/OSes worked in my reviews of the hardware, and thus, as our very first cart review, we’ll just focus on the emulation quality of these six games here and how they look/sound; they play nicely with all the Evercade consoles including the Super Pocket, so any system you have will run these fine.
Being Arcade games… Well, luckily they all look and sound excellent on Evercade. The visuals are sharp and crisp, and despite not having a Tate-oriented game for the Evercade EXP, the stuff we do have is well made and crisp enough to be a great selection of some of Irem’s best. These are all emulated in a version of MAME made for Evercade, but unlike a lot of cases where MAME is thrown onto an emulation thing and causes inaccurate emulation, everything looks and sounds just as it should.
Which is a good thing, considering how stuff like R-Type and Lightning Swords has some top tier music, and all of it made the jump intact. Nothing else to really note here.
Gameplay
Pop in the cart, and you get six games. That may seem like a small amount, and indeed, while it may be tempting to get a certain Irem collection on consoles due to the inclusion of home ports, trust me when I say this Evercade set is way better right off the bat due to the emulation working as it should. No weird slowdown, no random button mapping changes, no audio glitching or bugs, just the games working as you’d expect them to.
Unfortunately, no DIP switch settings are available for these games, so everything is the default option for the Arcade carts. Still, that doesn’t mean you won’t have fun here, and all in all, I was blown away by how stellar the games felt to play.
MOON PATROL– A game made famous in the US by Williams, brought over from Japan and became a cult hit worldwide. This is a simple scorechaser where you take your moon buggy across the moon, reaching new checkpoints as you try to avoid enemies attacking from above and in front of you, and like most games from 1982, go for the high score! You can technically “beat” this game, as once you clear the first set of stages, you move onto a harder set ending at Zone Z.
But really all you do here is move, jump, and shoot, and it works brilliantly. It may be tempting to button mash your way through the enemies, but eventually big rocks will come at you which you won’t be able to rapid fire like you can with airborne enemies. Thus, timing your shots is the big key here, and once you get the hang of that, Moon Patrol stays around as a fun scorechaser. Simple, yet a fun way to kill time!
10 Yard Fight– An Arcade football game you might know more via the NES port. In this game, you grab a football, and try to reach the other opponent’s goal by running past everyone. It’s incredibly basic, rather frustrating if you don’t know how to properly pass to your teammates, and it might disappoint people thinking this was more complex like Tecmo Bowl or something. Still, the simplicity of it makes it fun enough for a few minutes, but the lack of Vs. 10 Yard Fight for proper multiplayer really is a bummer, and the CPU will annoy you real quick. The weakest game of the cart by far.
R-TYPE– This is the iconic one. Alas, R-Type LEO hopers like me wanting that to get a proper port will have to wait a bit more. In a way, you could argue this game has been milked to death on god damn near everything, but that’s for good reason; it’s easily one of the best horizontal shooters ever made, and somehow despite being insanely hard, the game is well crafted in a way that rewards memorization and teaches the player skilled techniques without having to shout it in their face.
From an iconic intro stage, to very tricky mazes near the end of the game, to the sheer power of the Force Pod allowing for plentiful strategies really do make this a horizontal shooter that remains just as excellent as it always has been. Despite this being on almost every other system, the Arcade original is surprisingly rare to see these days, usually being sidelined in favor of ports like Dimensions, so this OG version is a neat thing to see come out again, and it still holds up tremendously well. The scoring is excellent too, and this was easily the game I enjoyed trying to 1CC and scorechase the most.
You’ll fail, and fail a lot! But the well crafted level design will keep you coming back for more, and outside of the Turbografx version, this is pretty much the best version of R-Type capable of running on the system, and this classic is just outstanding, emulated brilliantly here to boot. The only bad thing here is beating it made me want R-Type II on a followup cart even more.
Battle Chopper– Also known as Mr Heli, this shooter has you controlling a little helicopter navigating through winding stages in order to take out evil aircraft and strange monsters! It also is the hardest game on the cartridge by far, and is so absurdly difficult that not even lower DIP Switches would save you here; the PC Engine port is pretty evil, even.
Why is that? Because despite having a health bar, Mr Heli gets bumped a few times and explodes, the checkpoints can be quite distant from one another, and the enemies are constant. You have the occasional breather in the form of dropped crystals you can use for powerups, but those will quickly go away if you die, which you will, and that doesn’t even begin to touch just how devilish the later stages of the game become. That final stage was tough enough to make me want to flush the EXP down the toilet, because it just gets that unfair.
Despite all the frustration, though? I somehow still like Mr Heli. The scoring is decent, the presentation is cute, and there’s a weird charm to it all. Even if this is the arcade game you’ll absolutely be wanting to abuse save states on the most, it manages to be an entertaining enough time to be worth one playthrough of it. It definitely isn’t as balanced or well crafted as R-Type, but I found the charm and boldly evil level design to make this more memorable than the other shooter coming up.
Lightning Swords– Of all games to buy the cart over, this will probably be the winning game. It sure was what made me eager to check this cart out! See, Lightning Swords, AKA KEN-GO, never got a proper home port… Or any Arcade Archives reissue… Or really any quality reissue of any kind before this cart. It was dumped on an ancient PC compilation and shat onto the horrendous Retro Bit consoles with terrible emulation quality, and that was all Lightning Swords got.
And god, that was a huge shame. Because this game is just epic. In this action game, you take control of a Ninja warrior who must traverse the lands to defeat a clan of evil who’ve caused terror to his land, and all he has is a Sword to defend himself with. A sword that can charge up to multiple levels by holding down the attack button, and also block certain shots from hurting you. You could mash the button to take care of basic enemies, but for the more brutal foes and bosses, you’ll be relying on that charge attack and careful dodging technique to take them out, and damn is the game just pure fun.
The game is great to compete against your own high-scores in, and it’s really fun to try and 1CC or play all the way through for fun. It has local co-op, which makes a friend capable of joining in on the action, and Lightning Swords is one of Irem’s best hidden gems of the Arcade by far, and this Evercade cart is a premiere showcase for why these obscure gems deserve a reissue done right with excellent emulation like you see here. Just pure bliss.
In the Hunt– In this submarine shooter, you take control of a small sub who must destroy enemy ships and fight bosses at the end of each stage, with presentation very similar to the later Metal Slug series due to a bunch of Irem staff going off to form Nazca. …And hey, I reviewed this back when I tried to do Arcade Archives reviews for a while! So I guess if you want my thoughts then, you can read that review, but really In The Hunt wasn’t a game I was that impressed by.
The two player co-op is really fun, but causes the slowdown to get even worse, and while the VS duel you get if you stick a co-op session out to the end is fun, this really isn’t as in-depth or technical as a bunch of Irem’s other shooters. Moreso style over substance here, but don’t go into this one expecting a scorechasing masterpiece or a fun challenge.
Conclusion
This is how you do an Irem Collection. Even if 6 games sounds low on paper, for $20 this set of Arcade gems is an absolute steal. The emulation quality here is excellent, the games are very responsive, and the compelling scorechaser/1CC natures of R-Type, Moon Patrol and Lightning Swords is more than enough to keep you coming back even after beating those games. Really the only way I would improve this set, would be to punt out 10 Yard Fight and In The Hunt for R-Type II or something like Ninja Spirit, but even then, you have some incredible games here, leading to this being the Arcade cart I desperately want a followup to the most.
So many Irem gems never before reissued, that would be given way better treatment than the mess out on current gen consoles right now! From Cosmic Cop, R-Type LEO, Gunforce, and many many more, Irem has a lot more of equally outstanding arcade games worth bringing to this system, but whether or not we even get an Irem Arcade Vol 2, this first volume is an absolute must own for any arcade fan, and there’s a good reason I picked this as my debut cart review. If you never put this in your Evercade EXP, what are you waiting for?
I give Irem Arcade 1 for Evercade an 8 out of 10.