Amusement Arcade Toaplan Review: Retro fun shouldn’t cost this much

Amusement Arcade Toaplan offers a fascinating slice of retro gaming history, especially if you love shoot-em-ups – but getting every game is a seriously expensive affair.

Score: 2.5/5

Ethical disclaimer: While Amusement Arcade Toaplan is a free to download app, that only gets you access to Truxton and five demo games. The copy reviewed was supplied to me by the publisher with all titles enabled for play. As always, that gets them a review, nothing else, no editorial control or similar. Now on with the review.

I am, and this is no secret, a big fan of retro gaming. Is some of it nostalgia? Undoubtedly that’s part of it, though I maintain that there’s something for everyone to take away from looking back at gaming’s past.

Also read:
Why retro gaming matters for every gamer

Toaplan is arguably best known for its forays into the shoot-em-up genre, though that’s far from the only gameplay style it tackled back in the arcade days.

Amusement Arcade Toaplan is a collection of 25 of Toaplan’s games for iOS or Android; specifically it includes:

• Tiger Heli
• Guardian
• Alcon/Slap Fight
• Sky Shark/Flying Shark
• Pyros/Wardner
• Twin Cobra
• Rally Bike
• Truxton
• Hellfire
• Twin Hawk
• Horror Story
• Zero Wing
• Fire Shark
• Snow Bros
• Outzone
• Vimana
• Teki-Paki
• Ghox
• Truxton II
• Fixeight
• Dogyuun
• Grind Stormer
• Knuckle Bash
• Batsugun
• Snow Bros. 2

Which is quite a lengthy list of games, though not really of genres.

The vast majority of these games are shoot-em-ups, mostly of the vertical up the screen variety, with a handful of puzzle games, platform games and a couple of beat-em-ups to finish out the set.

By default and for no cost at all you get access to Truxton, as well as demo access to Tiger Heli, Wardner, Flying Shark, Snow Bros and Teki-Paki.

You can play Teki-Paki in trial mode for 3 minutes. That’s probably enough, actually.

The arcade scene back in the day was as much about imitation as it was creativity, and here the developers of Amusement Arcade Toaplan have pretty clearly taken some inspiration from the way that Capcom lays out many of its arcade collection titles, with a default view that simply scrolls down the list of your available titles, plus the ones you can buy as in-game add-on purchases.

There’s also the option to build your own “arcade” with three different layout styles that are meant to evoke the feeling of being in a building in Japan, the USA or Europe back in the day.

All the fun of… furniture arranging. Clearly this kind of thing isn’t for me.

I’ve never quite gotten on with this style of display – it’s in the Pac-Man Museum+ collection, for example – but maybe it’ll excite you to lay out your perfect arcade… with a bed next to it for some reason. I just find it’s a slower way to get to the games I want to play.

One truly weird limitation here, at least for the iOS version as reviewed is that there’s a limit to the number of arcade machines you can place in a room.

Not for space reasons, but (as far as I can gather from the pop-up screen that comes up when you add too many) because it doesn’t want to run the attract screens for more than about half a dozen machines.

Which suggests that arcade mode is actively emulating those machines in real time, even though you’re not playing them all simultaneously. That’s an odd programming choice right there.

The quantity of titles is certainly present, but what about the quality?

Well.. here there are some issues to be sure. While there’s probably somebody out there with deep and abiding love for every single game here individually, there’s a lot of theme repetition at play – it’s easier to make another helicopter or spaceship shooter than it is to make an entirely new engine – and there’s some games that haven’t really aged all that well if you don’t have that nostalgic glow for them in the first place.

Guardian, for example, is a space-based, automatic scrolling take on Kung Fu Master, but it’s nowhere near as fun. Teki Paki is a Tetris styled block game, but it’s kind of slow and tepid.

Knuckle Bash couldn’t feel more 1980s if it tried, and while that does mean that it is gloriously cheesy, it’s also a terribly dated and somewhat sludgy action game that’s not really worth more than a glance for historical curiosity’s sake unless you loved it as a youngster.

The shoot-em-ups are where the quality lies, honestly, and arguably maybe also with Snow Bros (but less so with Snow Bros 2). Snow Bros is an oddity here in some ways, because most of the rest of the platform style action games are not that good at all.

Snow Bros isn’t as good as Bubble Bobble (of course not, let’s not be silly here), but it’s still a decent enough platform game — and markedly better than, say, Demon’s World.

While all of the games in Amusement Arcade Toaplan do support touch controls, this is absolutely the worst way to play any of them. Most of these games are fast, twich-action games that need precise inputs at a rapid pace, and touch controls just can’t manage that. If you’re at all keen on Amusement Arcade Toaplan, get yourself a decent mobile controller to make the most of the experience.

Then there’s the problem of cost. Outside of Truxton, any of Amusement Arcade Toaplan’s games will cost you, at the time of writing this review, $7.99 per game, and outside of the five demo games, you can’t try any before you plunk down your cold, hard cash.

Want some sweet Slap Fight Action? It’ll cost you…

Which means if you wanted the full set, it would run you some $191.76 to get them all.

While I do appreciate not charging gamers for games they might not want, that’s still just too high a price to ask, especially for some of the clunkier games on offer here.

I suspect it might have been better to either drop the pricing just a touch here to make them more of an impulse buy, in the same way that classic arcade cabinets were affordable enough that you might have dropped your 20c piece into them for “just one more go”, or perhaps bundling up themes within them so you bought packs of helicopter shooters, or Snow Bros packs or similar to maximise your feelings of getting value out of them.

The elephant in the room here remains emulation, because it’s also entirely feasible – though not legal – for gamers to sample these games that way.

I do feel like there’s a better and stronger argument to be made for game preservation where developers are paid reasonably for older titles and they’re kept in circulation, but the overall pricing and structure of Amusement Arcade Toaplan doesn’t quite get the balance right.

The emulation of these classic games is fine, because of course it is, it’s child’s play to even the slowest of modern smartphones or tablets. But the pricing just isn’t quite there to make this a compulsive pickup title, unless you’ve got really strong memories of a specific game or two.

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