Taito Legends 2 (PS2)

Game captures were capped at 30 seconds and intro was not included in this capture to keep overall video length down to 20 minutes. Before I begin I just wanna say that I think Taito has an uncomfortable obsession with balls and fruit.

I love me some arcade compilation games. Taito Legends 2 ranks up there as one of the best compilations I've seen. No, I don't like every game in this collection, but there are so many games on this disc that it's hard not to find at least a handful of games you like. IMO this collection is worth it simply just for G Darius and Raystorm and I would have been happy if those were the only games that I liked out of it's whopping 38 GAMES! The cool thing is that unlike the first installment, this game has many more great titles than just those two. Many that I had not discovered until playing this compilation.

My favorite games in this compilation other than the two mentioned above are:

Lunar Rescue
The Fairyland Story
The Legend of Kage
Bonze Adventure
Nastar Warrior
Camel Try
Don Doko Don
Insector X
Growl
Gun Frontier
Liquid Kids
Metal Black
Arabian Magic
Darius Gaiden
Elevator Action 2

The games I absolutely hate are:

Balloon Bomber
Crazy Balloon
Qix
Wild Western
Chack'n Pop
Front Line
Cleopatra Fortune

Other games not in those two lists I find perfectly playable but nothing special. However 31 good games out of 38 games is still awesome. I could gush on a few of the games that I really love in this collection, but I'm gonna let the video and my list speak for themselves.

This collection is extremely cheap and available. As a matter of fact I just picked this up for my brother for an amazing 3 bucks. Taito Legends 2 is only available on the PS2 and PC in the United States. The PS2 version has a few exclusives that the PC and XBOX (PAL) versions don't have like Raystorm and G Darius. In turn the other versions have a few exclusives the PS2 version doesn't have most notably Rayforce. There are other exclusives for each version I haven't mentioned simply because I don't remember what they are and don't care as the ones mentioned above are the only ones worth caring about. I would have bought the XBOX version as well if it had been released here just for Rayforce which is an awesome game that came out before the other awesome game Raystorm. The PC version does have this game, but I can already play Rayforce on MAME on my PC.

Lastly one thing that people with large HDTVs might notice is that all the graphics may look kinda soft. This is due to the bilinear filtering that was applied to all arcade games back in the day to smooth out the jagged edges in the graphics. This has nothing to do with being standard resolution as some may think.