The Capcom Arcade Cabinet: Game Pack 1 gives you access to a number of old Capcom arcade games from the 80's and beyond. You know, back when we had arcades in malls, before they were gutted and replaced with clothing shops. Anyway, if you’d like to travel back to this magical time, the Capcom Arcade Cabinet will let you do that.

We’re talking about graphics from a few decades ago here, so it’s not going to be cutting edge stuff. That being said, these games do look clean, and they are colorful. Arcades were still the best looking, best sounding gaming out there for the time, before consoles starting surpassing them in power. The Cabinet gives you options for tweaking all of it to get the experience you want. You can adjust the graphics settings to smooth out things, for example. This kind of emulates the old school CRT monitors the games would have been displayed on back in the day. Whereas you can display the image cleanly on a high resolution monitor now, and show every sharp corner of every pixel, back in the day the monitors blurred everything a bit. It almost made up for some of the graphical limitations of the day in a way, since it could round out edges and blend colors where those things weren’t really possible in the games themselves. You can also enable a mode that adds the scanlines some monitors had. These are some pretty cool options for emulating the experience from way back when.

If we’re comparing games in the first game pack here, I wouldn’t say any of them really outshined the others in terms of look and sound. They simply approached graphical limitations in different ways. Avengers is an overhead scrolling beat-em-up with chunky sprites for the players and enemies. The background music is actually pretty good for its time, reminiscent of the background music from action movies of the same time period. 1943: The Battle of Midway is colorful, taking you over oceans and green plains, though most of the planes are similarly colored to cut down on the total number of colors. There’s a whole lot of repetitive sounds from your guns and the enemies, so the background music doesn’t really stand out. Black Tiger uses the black backgrounds trick to keep the overall colors and details down while keeping the feeling that you’re in a cavernous dungeon. A pretty standard adventuring track plays in the background. I really can’t describe the genre this music comes from other than to say it sounds like the music from a lot of similar fantasy adventuring games of the time with that chiptune charm to it.

3 games come in the Game Pack 1 for Capcom Arcade Cabinet: Game Pack 1. You’ve got Black Tiger, Avengers, and 1943: The Battle of Midway. Black Tiger is a typical side-scrolling platformer adventure game where you take on the role of a barbarian warrior who attempts to free the land from ravaging dragons. 1943 is a shooter (well, the kind that usually involved flying ships or planes back in the day, not FPS stuff that usually takes that title today) that puts you into an old warplane and a perhaps not so historically accurate battle against hundreds of other planes and aircraft carriers. Avengers is a top-down scrolling beat-em-up where you rescue kidnapped women from bad dudes (a typical scenario of the day).

There’s not much story in any of these games. Most of the story might be printed in a paragraph or two on the cabinet of the arcade machine back in the day. But you get the idea of what you’re doing by playing the game. In 1943, you shoot down the enemy planes, and the title "Battle of Midway" is a clue as to why you’re doing this. In Avengers, you punch and kick down enemy thugs to rescue the girls. In Black Tiger, you whack enemies with a flail, go into dungeons, and whack more enemies with your flail, with your ultimate goal being to take down the big dragons that are making life hell for the little people of the world. You kill stuff because it’s trying to kill you, and that pretty much worked as a story for most of these games.

Black Tiger does stand out a bit for having shops and upgradeable armor. Arcade games aren’t really known for this kind of character building. It also has a time limit, lest you try a little too hard to take advantage of this feature and build up a bunch of money. 1943 is a simple, classic shooter. It doesn’t have much in the way of fantastic enemies, since it’s loosely based on a real battle from WWII, but it is at least a fun shooter. Avengers is pretty much a study in the classic 80’s formula of the street smart guy going against the gang leader to rescue the girls.

Capcom Arcade Cabinet: Game Pack 1 brings you back to the retro games of the 80’s arcades. Most of these games were not meant to be easy. They were meant to make you spend quarters for extra time or lives. Still, some were more forgiving than others, or at least made you feel relatively good about yourself for a few levels before the difficulty ramped up. All the games in this pack pretty much follow this formula.

Because the games were difficult in the arcades, and because arcade games wanted to keep more people rotating into the game (instead of letting one person hog the machine all day), the overall length of these games was fairly short. You could beat Avengers in about an hour, for example, if you were good enough to do so without feeding too many quarters. This is where Capcom Arcade Cabinet shines, giving you the option to set any game to a super easy casual mode that gives you unlimited lives and sometimes some extra perks like a bit more forgiveness on registering hits against you.

The Capcom Arcade Cabinet: Game Pack 1 enables some cool extra features on any of the games you buy for it. There are galleries with pretty cool advertisement flyers and other various artwork you can unlock from each game after reaching certain gameplay goals.There are replay options for each game which allow you to record your play session for playback later. There are also network modes on each of these games except for Black Tiger. You can even fine tune the treble and bass settings of the audio on each game. And, of course, there are the extra gameplay incentives in the form of PlayStation trophies you can earn for each game.

These were pretty simple games in terms of controls, often only having two buttons to choose from. Avengers has a punch and kick, and that is pretty much it. 1943 is a game where you just need to keep mashing the fire button with an occasional super move that will wipe the enemies from the screen for you. Then Black Tiger is also a pretty simple one with a jump and an attack button to choose from. You can also choose an auto version of most of these attack buttons just to make your life a bit easier, and to give your thumb a bit of a rest.

Are any of these games going to blow your mind? No, and I’d say this group doesn’t really have any big standouts. There are some really classic, beloved Capcom arcade games, but I doubt you’ll get much name recognition from any of these. I do remember playing 1943 in the arcades, and it was a standout for being a fun, easily accessible game, but not particularly memorable in terms of an overall game. Avengers and Black Tiger just don’t stand out very much either, though Black Tiger’s use of upgradeable armor and weapons does make it a little more interesting for its time. Still, this might be a nice pack to buy if you want to throw a retro-themed gaming party. However, without much depth, they don’t have a lot of staying power.