Capcom Arcade Cabinet XBLA

This past Tuesday saw the release of the first trio of games — 1943: The Battle of Midway, Avengers and Black Tiger — in the planned 15-game Capcom Arcade Cabinet for XBLA and PSN. Capcom will bring three more selections from its 1980s library of 8-bit games to Xbox Live Arcade every two weeks, and XBLA gamers will eventually be able to purchase all 15 of the Capcom Arcade Cabinet games in one 2000-MSP bundle.

Neither Xbox Live Arcade nor Capcom are strangers to revisiting old classics, so why release these particular games? Why now? Speaking with Japanese site GAME Watch, Producter Kenji Kataoka “a lot of requests from users about porting our old games,” according to a rough translation provided by XBLAFans prolific tipster @lifelower. “We couldn’t at that time,” Kataoka continued, “but…Capcom’s 30th anniversary year is good timing for it. So finally, [we said,] ‘Let’s make a game for users.’ We also wanted to release games that are completely converted using [the] current gen consoles’ power as we can.”

Kataoka’s initial remarks didn’t quite explain why these exact titles were chosen, but GAME Watch pushed him further. “We roughly chose games based on popularity inside and outside of Japan,” the producer explained, “and narrowed down these 17 games. Most of them are requested a lot from users but we can’t release some games due to various reasons. Personally I wanted Street Fighter or Tiger Road.”

Tiger Road didn’t make it into the collection, but another feline-titled game, Black Tiger — which actually featured a dragon in its ’80s promotional artwork and was called Black Dragon in Japan — was. “We considered Ghosts’n Goblins but it’s too popular, so we were looking for [a] runner-up game. We have Monster Hunter and thought Black Dragon was a starting point of games [including] dragons. Black Dragon is easy to play because it came under Ghosts’n Goblins’ influence, and it has the Middle Ages fantasy world [that] Japan loves too.”

Speaking of Japan, the type of games the country produced in the 1980s were known for their unforgiving difficulties. Capcom Arcade Cabinet will feature a Casual Mode to make the more challenging games in the collection accessible to all gamers, but the mode wasn’t always included as part of the main experience; Kataoka originally planned to sell Casual mode separately. The producer cited a fear of changing the original games too much and offending fans who grew up with them as his reasoning for not wanting to include it with the games.

Budget-conscious XBLA gamers can thank Capcom’s Hidetoshi Ishizawa, who came on about midway through the project, for talking him out of it after “many” gamers told him it was a “terrible” idea. Kataoka chided himself for originally considering selling Casual Mode separately and thanked Ishizawa for saving him from “falling into the dark side.”

Asked if there was any chance Capcom Arcade Cabinet could continue as a franchise, Kataoka said, “I can’t tell you anything,” but that he’d consider it depending on feedback from gamers.

The second run of Capcom Arcade Cabinet releases will arrive on March 5 in the form of Ghosts n Goblins, Gun Smoke and Section Z.

Source: GAME Watch

(Thanks, @lifelower)