"This is your Daddy's Crack Down"

“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

In the days when our household only had a Genesis, we almost exclusively rented our video games. There were several we would see in magazines that we thought looked interesting, or would see the cover art in stores, but could never find to rent.

This is not one of those games. Until recently, I didn’t even realize there had been a Genesis game that shared the Crack Down name. I found it purely by accident when searching for information on the first Xbox 360 game, Crackdown. Had I seen any version of the game’s box art, I would have more likely pointed to laugh at the monocled baddie on the Mega Drive cover, or the fake Stormtrooper on the US version.

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Metal Slug XX proudly hearkens back to its arcade roots. The game was designed to get you to “insert coin”, and if you want to see the end you either have to have the reflexes of a cat ninja or hit continue 83 times like me.

Can a game that unapologetically kills you for every misstep be fun?

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"manliness (noun): Fighting a giant space centipede while entering Earth's atmosphere."

Over the last year, a new trend has gained popularity with game developers. I’m talking about new games made in the style (both graphically and in terms of gameplay) of “retro games”. On North American shores, it would seem that “Mega Man 9″ started the retro movement. However, in Japan, the country where such games originate, Konami’s “Gradius ReBirth” was released almost a month earlier.

The reverting of the Gradius franchise into an “old school” style was apparently successful enough to not only spawn “Contra ReBirth”, but also “Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth” and “Salamander ReBirth” (according to recent ESRB ratings and filed trademarks).  Is a game intentionally made to look and play like something a decade or two old worth the ten dollar price tag? Let’s find out!

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