Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium review: If you want to travel back in time in style

Stylishly prepared collection with numerous setting options that make playing through easier.

It’s nothing new that good money can be made from collections of popular classics. The preparatory work was done by resourceful programmers with their mostly free emulators, but the industry has long since opened up and also offers individual implementations as well as general platforms on which several games, usually from a specific publisher, run at the same time.

Capcom Arcade Stadium is one of those platforms, released last year and houses 31 games that you have to buy in packs of 10, individually or as a bundle if you don’t want to just use the platform and a game that comes with it. And it is precisely this concept that the successor is now continuing with Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium.

Because again you can also download the second stadium for free and get an oldie (this time, let’s say the inconspicuous platformer SonSon) for free – for all other 31 games, either just under four euros per title or just under 40 for the complete package are due . There are no “ten cards” this time. Logical: If you don’t know the majority of the old hams, the best thing to do is to get the complete edition. If you already own several of them as parts of other reissues, you have to calculate how you spend money most effectively.

Either way, part two of the collection includes some games (click here for the official overview) that do not belong in the standard repertoire of frequently quoted or even newly released classics. Although I have to say that a lot of things are new to me because I first grew up in the East and later mainly on the PC. In any case, I got stuck on several things here for much longer than my schedule would have liked.

Among other things, I liked Three Wonders, which contains a shmup, a platformer and a puzzler and at least the first two of which still look very chic today. There are a few interesting concepts in the mix anyway, including the vertical Western shootout Gun Sumoku, in which you don’t just stubbornly shoot straight ahead, but depending on the button pressed, to the left or right, only halfway in one direction or with a revolver in each one of the two directions. I also think the material battle racer Rally 2011 LED STORM is great (that’s how Capcom imagined the future at the time) as well as Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, in which various Street Fighter figures assemble falling stones as quickly as possible to form the largest possible blocks.

In fact, almost all titles are at least interesting, mostly still really good video games that you can easily spend a few afternoons with. Different versions of the first two Street Fighters, Darkstalkers 3 and 1943 and other familiar names round off the high-quality range in a successful way.

It’s not just the classics themselves; As with the first part of the collection, Capcom has also done an excellent job of processing it. You can not only save at any time, but also set the level of difficulty, choose the number of lives, activate a general invulnerability and even regulate the speed at which the programs run. But the most helpful thing is rewind, with which you can undo every screen death and even convert challenging boss fights into a walking simulator. Of course you don’t have to use it! But it helps enormously to familiarize yourself with the historical material without frustration.

There are also three challenges for each game in which you fight for points or the fastest time in global rankings, so that the normally lonely journey through time becomes a modern competition. You also unlock themes for the arcade machines that serve as backgrounds in the beautifully designed main menu, and short manuals explain all important content for each game. Of course, various filters and an image that can be rotated by 90 degrees ensure that you either experience the oldies on every monitor as you played them back then or remembered them instead.

As I said: Capcom prepares its former arcade program very comprehensively and lovingly – I just wish they would also dedicate a few sentences to the oldies, which might say a word about the technology, how it came about or the special features of the game. At least a rudimentary historical treatment should be the next step that collections like this take.

That being said, I’d like to set the PC version to show PlayStation controller buttons instead of Xbox gamepad buttons. And last but not least, ideally there would be a key assignment that fits better with an arcade stick so that I don’t have to adapt it to the respective control scheme for each game. On the other hand, when using a gamepad, I’d like to use the eight directions of an analog stick as buttons, so the directional shooting in Gun Sumoku, for example, could feel that much better.

Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium Review Verdict

Aside from small omissions, Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium is a highly recommended collection of damn good classics, which are presented in a stylish way and with a number of helpful options that make it easier to get started with the game design, which is basically a bit outdated. You will find a quite diverse selection of different genre representatives, most of which have not already been reissued umpteen times. Unfortunately, the only real catch is that the PC version does not currently run on the Steam deck and crashes there as soon as it is started. Apart from that, you will hardly find a better legal access to revel in the good old days.