Title: Taito Arcade 2
System: Evercade
Price: $29.99
Release Date: Sept 2025

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Prelude

Launching alongside Taito Arcade 1, Taito Arcade 2 also carries some games from the Taito Super Pocket, while adding in a few exclusives to the mix. There are still games not on either cart such as Cadash and Puzzle Bobble, but otherwise by and large this helps clear out the majority of the Super Pocket titles and hopefully leaves a potential Taito 3 open to more games not on the pocket.

Presentation

Same as the usual routine with these Arcade carts; well emulated, and pretty identical to the Taito Pocket renditions in that regard. Liquid Kids actually runs properly during the intro/ending cutscenes unlike the Super Pocket, so this cart version is actually an improvement. Operation Wolf still uses a virtual cursor due to being a Light Gun on a joystick game, and it looks fine.

Gameplay

Same drill as always, I gotta think of funnier things to put here.

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Alpine Ski– The first of two Cart exclusive games, Alpine Ski is a very simplistic skiing game where you have to race against the clock in order to make it to the goal! Running into things will waste time, and reaching the end of the goal is key. Along the way, there are points to pick up in some pretty tricky places!

After clearing the first section, you then go to a flag race, where you must go between flags in order to pick up points without running over the flags. This is a bit tougher than the first stage, and tries plenty of ways to trick you into running over flags to lose points. Lastly is a ski jump where you must try to get a good landing, letting you again, score some points. Rinse and repeat on harder loops and that’s all Alpine Ski has to offer.

I must add some advice to this one that will help you enjoy this one a little more; do not mess with the DIP switch settings. Doing so to reward you with extra lives will make it far too easy to keep getting extended plays and thus make the game go on forever, making the game incredibly tedious and outright boring. In fact, it’s pretty boring on the default DIP settings, but at least there’s still the penalty of losing if you crash too many times and the time gets pretty tight after a few stages. Overall mediocre and ultimately one you won’t be playing for score all that much.

The Electric Yo-Yo– We may not have Qix, but this oddity helps give a Qix-esque experience in the second of two cart exclusive titles. In this game you can only move a yo-yo around, linking between blox all over the screen as this electrified thingy bounces around the playfield. If it touches a blox, then it electrifies it and allows your Yo-Yo to absorb said electricity to become semi-invincible.

The electrified Yo-Yo can run over and ignore the small green guys trying to park on the blox, but it still will die when touching the electrified enemy. Clear all the blox and move onto a new stage with a different pattern. What would otherwise be an unassuming dot-eater of sorts ends up being surprisingly addicting due to the electrification aspect, since collecting more and more electrified blox will add to a bonus point total at the end of the level. Thus you could just wait it out and try to risk grabbing more electrified blox for that huge point bonus, or you might end up making it much harder on yourself by having that electrified enemy kill you more often.

Nevertheless, that urge to pile up those bonus blox really elevates this game from an otherwise simplistic scorechaser into one that’s quite addicting in a similar way to Qix, and this quickly shot up to being one of my favorites on the two Taito cartridges by far. Quite excellent for a scorechaser!

Elevator Action– This little action game got better known after its superior sequel launched in the late 90s, but this original game isn’t that bad either. You take control of a secret agent who must scale down buildings while collecting secret files from red doors, with only a gun to defend yourself with.

Enemies will pop out of doors pretty frequently, and will either fire while standing up or ducking, and you’ll have to counter accordingly in order to stay alive. Ducking makes you lock in place unless you press up on the D-Pad, which is pretty easy to trip up on, but after you get used to the weird ducking this becomes a decent little game.

Takes far too long for the scoring to become fun though, since that first building is a slow drag and the only other major point bonuses you can nab come from shooting down lights and defeating enemies in the dark, and even then the extra points you get aren’t that special. It might be fun for a few minutes, but even when playing for score this one is quite sluggish and just makes me wish I was playing the sequel instead. Hell, even that weird Dexter’s Laboratory GBC sequel is more in-depth than this one.

Kiki Kaikai– You might perk up a bit hearing the name and thinking of the SFC games or that modern sequel, but no, this original Arcade game isn’t as intense as either of those. Nor does it have co-op.

You still do have a pretty fun shooter, though. In this game you take control of Sayo as she goes between multiple stages, sweeping away at enemies with her Gohei rod or shooting them with talisman. You fight all swords of funny looking Japanese yokai, and each level ends in a pretty fun boss fight.

Unlike pretty much every other game with an ending on these sets, Kiki Kaikai doesn’t really have a continue feature. Thus, you have to actually memorize for a 1CC if you want to see the end of this one without save states, and I found it to be pretty darn fun when playing with that mindset. There are plenty of upgrades for your talisman to collect throughout the stages, along with some secret items that can pop up if you look in certain places. Crystal Ball items are especially helpful, allowing you to either freeze all the normal enemies on screen or instantly clear the screen of them. Unfortunately, you cannot use them during a boss fight and have to actually get good.

Still, these upgrades do come in handy and memorizing where to get them helps for progressing further and further over time, along with raising your score if you just want to go for a high score. There’s actually a point difference between sweeping away enemies with the Gohei or shooting them with the talisman, and the latter gets you more points but is a little more risky. Thus, there’s quite a bit of strategy when it comes to scoring and those secret pickups can also help in that regard, too, making this one a game I found myself going back to more than I had previously once I started to discover the intricacies to the score system.

Sure, you could just save state your way through the game and beat it that way, but I honestly do implore you to try playing this with scoring in mind and to 1CC it, you’ll likely be surprised at how satisfying it feels to memorize more and more of the game over time! I even think it’s worth fiddling with the difficulty settings if you get sick of the same enemy patterns, since the different difficulty DIP settings also change up the enemies and helps to remix the game a bit. Overall, a game I long assumed to be just an average shooter that had a surprising amount of depth the more I spent with it thanks to this Evercade reissue. Score fanatics, check this one out!

The NewZealand Story– Europe is freaking obsessed with this game, and there’s a good reason why it ended up as the cover game to this set. In this action platformer, you take control of a kiwi on a quest to shoot a bunch of enemies to save their relatives. What would normally be a typical, cute and easy looking platformer is way more in-depth than one might initially think, which helps to bring a whole lot of charm to this one.

For starters, while you could just focus on reaching the end of the stages normally, this is yet another Taito game in the mold of Bubble Bobble where a ton of secrets are everywhere. Extend bubbles, alternate exists, warp doors, secret areas, you name it. So many opportunities to shake up your routing, and lots of fun ways to score big. Your kiwi can even ride enemy vehicles if you carefully aim at the enemy rather than what they’re riding, which is usually how you end up finding a lot of these secrets to begin with.

Even still, the huge amount of warps and depth to this one makes NewZealand Story pretty darn replayable just as a casual experience, but going for points or trying to 1CC it with as safe a route as possible? Now you have a fun challenge ahead of you, and this Arcade original is still one of Taito’s best games, and one I’m always happy to see no matter what.

Operation Wolf– I just reviewed this in a compilation where it was a centerpiece game, and my opinion is basically the same. In this light gun shooter, you must shoot everything in sight, using grenades and your own weapon to counter enemy fire and defeat the enemies before they kill you.

Even with a mouse, that’s easier said than done due to the extreme randomness in this game, which can make some of the levels an absolute nightmare. This is the US version, so no selecting your stages out of order, but that doesn’t really help all that much anyhow. You’ll quickly find yourselves overwhelmed by the absurd amount of enemies and damage thrown your way, and unless you get absolutely lucky you will not be 1CCing this, or even getting all that far without save stating mid-stage.

Ultimately a game that pads out its short length by making absolute sure you’re enraged by the difficulty, and I kinda wish the sequel or Space Gun was chosen instead since they’re better as actual games and co-op compatible to boot. Alas, this one is iconic for reasons I do not fathom, so thus you have it here yet again. At least it’s much more playable on an Evercade device, unlike on the Taito Pocket, where that version made it quickly apparent how rough the D-Pad on that thing was. Play it on an Evercade Alpha, and you’ll have a slightly better time! Not enough to make this a good video game, though.

Rastan– A famous action platformer by Taito, and for good reason. In this game, you take control of a Barbarian who must set out on a quest to slay a dragon that’s making people go mad. The Japanese version actually has more backstory for the intro (in English!) but the US version here cut that out. Otherwise the only other big difference is that the JP version resets your score upon a continue while the US one retains it, making this one not so great for scorechasing unless you want to 1CC attempt it, but still an excellent game to just play through casually.

You go through multiple stages broken up into two halves; an overworld and a castle segment, with limited checkpoints for each part. You have a basic jump and attack control scheme, and can pick up temporary upgrades to your weapon to make it a bit stronger. Ultimately though, this is a game where you gotta take it easy and slow, while memorizing enemy formations in order to counter them as you progress, which makes this one quite fun to try and learn to do on a single credit. The controls are pretty solid for the most part, and while the music sounds like someone having way too much fun playing with the FM sound, they’re still catchy compositions.

Every now and again you’ll end up in a boss fight, which can be pretty tricky to get past until you realize down thrusting on the enemy shreds their health bar to pieces, but even still this is a pretty good time and one I always find fun to play for the sake of completing it, especially compared to its abysmal sequel. Do be aware that upon entering the final castle continues are shut off, so don’t hesitate to use save states if you really want to see the ending!

Volfied– This ain’t Qix, but this is the closest you’ll get to it in this sequel. In this game, you take control of a ship who must draw lines around these mechanical alien creatures in order to box them in, while trying to avoid getting blown up. The enemies like to bounce around a lot so careful drawing is key, and it becomes incredibly fun to take risky moves to get a higher percentage boxed in.

You can’t draw at a slower speed anymore, but you can collect a range of handy powerups, such as a faster speed, the ability to stop time, a weak laser, or an absolutely overpowered beam that destroys the stage enemy and rewards you with an absurd amount of points. That latter aspect does make the scoring a little weird, since you could go through multiple stages and do well, and come nowhere close to a run where you found the weapon on the first stage and destroy the enemy.

This does hurt the scorechasing aspect of the game a bit as a result, but Volfied is still pretty good fun for fans of Qix, and likewise maintains the risk/reward factor that made the original so addicting. I might not like it as much as that first game, but this is still my second favorite Qix title for good reason, and a great choice for the cart.

Liquid Kids– Another action platformer in the Taito vein of “find random secrets and get big point combos from defeating a lot of enemies at once”, and the game is just as fun as it sounds. In this one you control a platypus of sorts as you throw water balloons at enemies to take them out. You can charge up the water balloon to make a bigger splash, and stunning an enemy with the water balloon allows you to kick it. Get a bunch of foes like that in a row, and you can rack up some big points that way.

While NewZealand Story was pretty great and had lots of fun secrets, I did find the level designs of that one to be a little too abstract, even if it didn’t detract from the game too much in my view. Liquid Kids on the other hand has a lot more clever stages, and a better attack gimmick. It never stops being satisfying to clear out a bunch of enemies at once with the water balloons and get big points outta it, nor does it stop being satisfying to stumble upon a secret warp or secret stage on complete accident.

The bosses in this game are pretty great too, and far better than in NewZealand story, making this one a pretty fair platformer to play either casually, 1CC attempting, or just getting risky to focus on points. It also helps that at the end of each world you have two paths to take in order to slightly change up the next world, leading to even more replay value alongside the usual secret warp hunting. I’ve always considered Liquid Kids one of Taito’s greatest hidden gems, and I’m thrilled to see it on Evercade. It was a great pick for the Super Pocket as well, so it being available to more people is never, ever a bad thing. Definitely the best game of the set by far, and well worth a full play.

Conclusion

At first I assumed this having a lot of leftovers from the Super Pocket would make for a pretty boring set. After all, when one of your two Cart exclusive games is Alpine Ski, that doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Luckily, the addictive nature of Electric Yo-Yo really helps to elevate this cart quite a bit for me, and the fact that I was reminded just how darn good the other games on this cart were, really did make me appreciate each game here quite a lot more. While the first set’s Super Pocket leftovers were a bit on the decent/good side of things, almost every game here is just excellent or really darn good in general, with Alpine Ski and Operation Wolf being the only games I’d consider a dud.

Ultimately, playing through several of these games all over again really did remind me just how excellent Taito was when it came to scoring or secret hiding, and how much replay value those mechanics could provide. Whether you want to 1CC, play for score, or just beat these games with Save States, there’s something on this cart for everyone, which easily makes it one of my favorite Evercade carts in that regard. If you don’t own a Taito Super Pocket but wanted some of the games, this is a must-own. Now I’m hoping we see a third one!

I give Taito Arcade 2 an 8 out of 10,