VISCO Collection (Nintendo Switch) Review

You boot up the collection, and pick up the super-cartoony Captain Tomaday amongst a group of seven arcade cabinets. It's structured like a vertical shoot 'em up, only the main character fights by extending his firsts. He hits enemies, and can juggle power-ups before they fall down, pretty much like in TwinBee. Actually… it's very similar to TwinBee but like a weak copy of it.

Feeling kind of bored, you choose a different one. Goal! Goal! Goal! turns out to be an enjoyable football experience, only one that, once again, will create strong feelings of déjà vu, as it's similar to almost every early '90s arcade football game. Ganryu? A nice ninja-style side-scroller ala Ninja Gaiden and so on. Andro Dunos? A more than decent R-Type-esque horizontal shooter… that will make you want to play R-Type after a while, and so on and forth.

The rest of the collection includes two PONG-like titles (Bang Bead and FlipShot) with actual fighter characters handling the paddles, and a pretty neat top-down perspective racer called NEO DriftOut, which is probably the best of the bunch - a statement that comes from someone who isn't exactly the biggest fan of the genre. In conclusion, there's nothing bad here, but every single title feels like a mediocre version of the "real" thing.

Note that, apart from NEO DriftOut, which has almost excellent controls, most have a tendency for the directional arrows to be overly sensitive, with one slight push sending your character a few steps further than you wanted - unknown if it's a matter of bad emulation from the transition from the Arcades to this port, as the one writing this hasn't played the originals in order to being able to tell the difference.

It should also be noted that, as far as similar collections go, this is somewhat barebones. The selection screen is a simple cabinet, which is fitting of course, but other than that nothing else to spice things up. No special filters besides the pretty typical CRT effect, and no additional mechanics besides online support for a couple of titles. No extra info on the games themselves, nothing about their history or something along these lines as is sort of customary with retro collections. Long story short: this isn't really a bad/badly-made collection… but one can find much better nowadays.