Rocket Knight Adventures: Re-Sparked Review (nickisonlinet)
TL;DR Great collection, fun games, questionable price point and presentation quality but you can always chunk out the ROMs included with your emulator of choice
Never in my life would I have thought that I'd see my beloved obscure opossum get a second chance at life after discovering his games via that one bootleg of the SNES game with Sonic in place of Sparkster. While it can use some works on specific areas, this collection is really good at letting you experience some of the best platformer games I've ever played!
PROS:
- A trio of some of the best hidden gems in Konami's library: fun gameplay, amazing 16-bit graphics, banging soundtracks and fun characters. The first game is undoubtedbly the highlight of the collection, but the other two games are still as great
- Save state (albeit one per game), rewind features and regional ROM variants for both games (which is most notable in RKA 1)
- The boss rush mode certainly adds up to the test
- Emulation is near-perfect, with adjustable video display modes and a decent CRT filter
- Museum contains source quality scans of promotional art and previously undiscovered concept art
- The beautiful new animated intro
- The ability to play the official ROMs using other emulators via the easily accessible files
CONS:
- Price point (in most countries): These games are great, but I think $30 for just these three games is asking for too much, personally recommend getting when its on a discount
- Audio emulation: the audio for the games (most notably Rocket Knight Adventures and Sparkster: Rocket Knight Adventures 2) sound like it was being put through a low-pass filter, sounding more compressed compared to other sources. (There was an audio crackling issue with the games at launch but this was fixed in an update!)
- The removal of button remapping (not much of an issue with controllers but really an issue with the keyboard preferences), in-game control and sound options are also strangely removed
- Museum content missing: Regional variants of several manuals are notably omitted, some pages are missing in several manuals, art collection is still noticeably missing several bits across other games and some scans featured are notably compressed when compared to other sources
- (mostly minor) Lower tone recordings for the Rocket Knight Adventures soundtrack in the music player
- UI in general feels rather cheap, broken when using Steam overlay. PC display options are limited, doesn't feature 1080p resolutions, and there's no borderless options
- Boss rush is occasionally broken when trying to recognize phase advancements
For new players, the Rocket Knight Adventures games are some of the best games on the Genesis/Mega Drive and SNES; if you're looking for a good platformer series, these games are a go! For people who've already owned the games or are collectors, the collection is great but I'd recommend when it's on sale. But for the people who pay extra attention to presentation detail, I don't know if this one is for you.