Unsurprisingly, there are dragons in this fantasy game

I was a big fan of Magic Sword (the SNES version) when I was younger.  There was something about the fantasy setting, the magic, and the swelling, epic music.  Not only that, but you had the great stereotypical fantasy characters following you around if you freed them: the barbarian, the amazon, the white wizard and his presumably goatee-d opposite, the dark wizard.

The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that I never finished the game before.  Either the SNES version didn’t have infinite continues or I couldn’t be bothered to sit in one place for long enough to finish all 50 floors.  I suspect it was the former, especially since the game is relentless in its quarter-guzzling difficulty.

This is usually the point where I lament that a great game from my younger days was lost in the sands of time, but I thankfully don’t have to with this one.  It was just released as part of a double pack, Final Fight: Double Impact, and it’s a steal at only $10.

I spent the better part of my weekend at my friend/co-host Knobs‘ house, and we took the opportunity to get some couch co-op in with the collection.  It didn’t take us long to start acting like we were kids, stealing each other’s food and trying to figure out how we just did that awesome thing in-game.  It reminded me that we just don’t have enough of these games out lately, even with XBLA/PSN being the perfect platforms for simple beat-’em-ups.  For $10 a developer could put up a great two or four-player game like this and make a killing.  Sure, we had Castle Crashers, but that was so frustratingly buggy at launch that it probably lost a considerable amount of steam at its launch.

I certainly don’t want to gloss over the general design of the pack, either.  When you fire up the game, there are two arcade machines sitting against a wall with various in-game items surrounding them.  After selecting which game of the two, the machine even boots, doing its starting test on-screen.  Each arcade machine looks a little dirty and some of the stickers on the front of the cabinet look like they may have been picked at by some kid with greasy pizza fingers.  You can even set the machine to display the old CRT fuzzy edges and scanlines.  Hell, you can even set up a game so that anyone online can come hopping in, like someone walking up to the machine you’re on in the arcade and throwing in a quarter.

I won’t lament the loss of the arcade experience in the US.  It was an amazing time as a child, pumping quarters into machines in dirty, loud arcades.  Maybe next time I’ll write something about the arcade I frequented as a kid and my favorite games.

But $10 is a small price to pay to play a great game and relive some great childhood memories.

Side Note: I forgot that we shot some video of Knobs and I playing Magic Sword this week as pre-show for TVGP.  Here it is: