Title: Gaelco Arcade 2
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Mid 2022
Prelude
We arrive at our second Piko Cart review, with the second volume of Gaelco games. I’m doing this before the first for the same reason I did Interplay out of order. Six oddities from Spain, all owned by Piko now, with actual gems thrown in here! Rest assured, this isn’t close to being at the bottom of my list.
Presentation
These games are a bit interesting, mainly because a bunch of them were known for being nigh impossible to emulate for the longest time due to crazy encryption techniques.
However, by the time Blaze got to them, that was long since resolved and thus all the games look and sound as they should, incredibly weird bugs and audio quirks from the original games included. Not much else to note here.
Gameplay
More games, more oddities from Piko! This time around though, we have some actual quality to look forward to.
Big Karnak– We start off with one of Galeco’s earliest games, even predating the ones from the first collection. Here you have a funny little belt scroller where the main objective is to defeat an evil god and save the princess, by traveling across several very long stages. It is your typical jump and attack kind of game, and you eventually find various weapons to help you throughout the adventure. Seems like typical stuff, but Big Karnak has some weird issues that holds the entire experience back.
The biggest just comes from the fact that this game is incredibly jank. Hitboxes are incredibly bizarre, a bunch of the sound effects are ripped straight from Technos titles like Double Dragon, (but at least the funny death sounds are also included) and on a lot of versions of MAME this game was notorious for randomly crashing. Lots of absurdly cheap deaths to be had everywhere, making this a very tough 1CC, and one you’ll probably not have that much fun with trying to play for score, either. Thankfully here on Evercade I never noticed the MAME-tier crashes, except for one I’m pretty sure was the game’s fault due to how weird the co-op function acts during the final boss fight.
Oh yeah, you have co-op here too! Pretty typical for the genre, and for the most part it works decently well. However, the final boss does introduce a whole “take turns” mechanic where the other player just casually sits to the side until the current player dies. Right as I was about to game over and my friend would have taken over, I hit the continue button and the game just softlocked, with no way for either of us to do anything. So uh, yeah be careful if you’re planning to beat this in co-op.
All in all, a very average, mildly amusing action game that doesn’t have much special going for it, and you’ll also realize for a lot of Galeco’s games that there isn’t really much incentive or ability to do a good job with scorechasing either, and here your score carries over upon continuing, making Big Karnak more or less a game you play to try and beat it once and be done with it.
Squash– Based off the real sport! There’s also not many video games based off said sport, and it quickly becomes apparent as to why that would be the case. Here you hit a ball against the wall, then have the opponent try to hit it, and keep on the rally until the opponent messes up or you do. Playing against the CPU, Squash is incredibly boring and was a game which failed to keep my attention going for too long. It just felt like boring tennis!
But bringing in a local friend to play, ended up making Squash a bit more fun. Dealing with a real person VS a boring computer opponent made the clunkiness of the game a lot more manageable to deal with, and trying to beat your friend at a game like this was actually fun enough to want to complete matches in full. An interesting curio, but really a game that you won’t have much enjoyment in trying to play if you happen to be by yourself.
TH Strikes Back: Thunder Hoop 2- The original Thunder Hoop, which we’ll get to later in more depth, is a pretty frustrating mess of a game that took a Dragon Ball inspiration and used it to make up a bunch of nonsensical levels with cheap difficulty. This sequel doesn’t really tone down the frustration or nonsense level design, but it does make the core gameplay a lot more enjoyable. Rather than just jumping and shooting through slow, boring stages, the levels in TH2 are a lot more like a run and gun, so add that shift in alongside local co-op, and you have a visual spectacle of insanity to deal with that isn’t too terribly long to credit feed through.
Unfortunately, trying to play it for 1CC or self-practice purposes does make it incredibly apparent just how poorly balanced the game is, and this also continues the Galeco trend of having absurdly high local score thresholds that you shouldn’t even bother trying to meet them. The gameplay as a whole is more fun than TH1, but it still suffers from a lot of similar cheapness, and even if you’re careful enough to beat the first stage on a single credit, you probably won’t make it farther than that.
To make matters more annoying, this game, at least during the time I played it in co-op with my friend a few years ago, had a nasty bug with the save states where if you save state then exit the game, and then try going back into the save state, the game would just completely break and be a mess, forcing you to have to reset from the beginning to actually make progress. I have no idea if they’ve fixed this since, but such an absurd reaction to save states just adds yet another example to show how sloppy TH2 as a game manages to be. A good fun time credit feeding with a friend, but not worth playing outside of that.
Touch and Go– Uh-oh, another sports game! Thankfully this one is a lot better than Squash, as we have some good ol Volleyball on display here! A pretty simple to control, one-button game, just take on teams of opponents and beat them in Volleyball. This one naturally gets pretty tricky as the games go on, but it manages to be plenty of fun that I found myself happily trying to beat all the teams, and trying to do that all on a single credit.
There’s also a multiplayer mode here, but rather than just being a 1V1, you can choose to play against each other with CPU partners, or on the same side as a local co-op mode against the usual CPU gauntlet. Pretty darn fun, and what I’d consider the multiplayer gem of the cart!
World Rally 2- The sequel to the smash hit World Rally, this one adds two new cars and a bunch of new courses. A pretty typical racing game, with you just moving the car left or right while holding down the accelerate button and making turns as needed, with the main goal being to clear all the courses by saving as much seconds as possible during those turns!
This is very, very much easier said than done, but unlike a lot of other Galeco games, this one actually felt reasonable to play for a score focus, and the more you practice, the better you get at these World Rally games! Really darn fun, though I found the courses in the first game to be a bit better overall. Also worth noting is that the original cabinet had a two player feature meant to be done by connecting the cabs, but since Evercade is only a single cabinet emulation, you just have the one player experience here. Still worth a play though, and easily the best game of the cart without a doubt.
Manic Square– A puzzle game that you’d think would be an easy slam dunk, tasking the player to match colors, clear them and reach the next stage. You can do chain reactions, and you can do bigger clears, so you’d also hope this would make for a fun score chaser with a time attack focus.
Sadly, no. This one is a rather big dud in my book, and is immensely boring. It takes forever for the stages to get remotely difficult, and by the time they finally do, it still doesn’t manage to be that much of a big deal since the game’s pacing is just painful. Whoever decided to make this a level based, time-attack focused puzzler instead of a more traditional clear for score kind of game absolutely ruined this game; and I can say that with semi-confidence since a prototype version (hidden on some Evercade system OSes) does have a more traditional scoring system and is a bit more fun.
Key word being a bit, since even that prototype doesn’t hold up to the many better puzzlers on the market at that time. There’s a 2P mode too, but playing this with my friend was uneventful. Avoid this one.
Conclusion
Ultimately, I felt in my memory that I liked Gaelco 2 better than the first one, hence why I picked this one first for the review order. But the more I played into these six games, the more I realized it was less me liking the cart as a whole, but rather me really enjoying Touch n Go and World Rally 2, and finding Big Karnak rather funny.
Two of the other three games are decent fun if you have a local player around to do the multiplayer modes in then, but are dull otherwise, and Maniac Square is just miserable the more I try to play through it. Really the core of Gaelco 2 is World Rally 2, and if you happen to not even care for driving or sports games, this one is a pretty mixed bag of oddballs I recommend you skip.
Still, the two games that are good, are really good, and if you have a buddy around there’s still a good amount of stuff worth playing through at least once. Will the first set live up to my expectations better? We’ll have to wait and see.
I give Galeco Arcade 2 a 6 out of 10.