You know, I’ve realised there’s a flaw in playing arcade games on a non-arcade device. You just keep piling virtual coins in until you win. Sure, you can do this on MAME, and yes, the EXP does have a credit limit option, but still – completing a game is as much an exercise in pressing “insert coin” as it pressing punch and kick. Because ain’t nobody limiting themselves to 3 credits unless they’re masochists.

The game is as it ever was. I played as Haggar and punched more people called Bred and Poison than you could ever imagine existed before reaching the final fight (oh-ho!) and punching wheelchair-guy out the window. Yes, I put a lot of electronic coins in the slot. But it’s fun and the graphics are huge and it hasn’t really aged badly. Providing you ignore all the stuff about Poison’s backstory, anyway. Which isn’t mentioned here, so you can!

Is it MERCS not Mercs? Everywhere seems to say it in all-caps, but why? It’s not an acronym. In this TED Talk I’ll be explor…

Not really. I don’t care. What I do care about, however, is that this, a three-player game, is one of the Capcom games built into the strictly single player Evercade EXP. Seems an odd choice to me, but then I suppose it’s another title to show off the EXP’s tate (or TATE? Answers in the comments, please) mode. Which it does, and it’s just as well because oh my is everything tiny when round the “normal” way.

MERCS/Mercs is the sort-of sequel to the similar Commando game, only it’s a lot easier (you have a health bar instead of insta-death, and when you die you just carry on rather than go back to a checkpoint) and, from what I remember from the much-played Spectrum Commando, it’s a lot shorter too. Very, very short in fact.

It was mindless fun though, and the flamethrower weapon is just glorious.

Oh would you look at that. My Limited Edition Evercade EXP finally arrived! And with it, a bgt pile of games – some built-in, and two Arcade cartridges. So, what will I play? Why, Lightning Swords, a game I’ve never heard of, of course!

Imagine if Revenge of Shinobi was Rolling Thunder, and you’re most of the way towards what Lightning Swords is. A sideways scrolling swordy-slashy game with hundreds of identical foes and a few bosses. You can pick up powerups which appear to do nothing, and you can do special attacks by holding down the slash button for a bit. It’s not bad, but you can see how it’s designed to chew through all your 10ps.

Bafflingly, to jump you press up. Why? This isn’t an 8-bit computer game with a one-button Quickshot II – it’s an arcade game with as many buttons as you want! They could easily have made the Evercade version respond to a second button for jump, even if that were as well as up, but no. Feels unnecessarily fiddly.

But anyway. Done. It’s not the best game in the world but it was fine.

Note: screenshot isn’t mine, it’s from the Evercade site. Would be nice if you could screenshot on an Evercade!

Despite the name, there’s no actual detectiving in 64th Street. Sure, at the end of each level a wall of text comes up to say you found a clue to, uh, whatever the thing you’re supposed to be doing is, but actually, the game is 100% punching and kicking people. Because, it’s a Final Fight type game after all.

I’d never heard of it before, and, when I came to write this I’d already forgotten what game it was. But I do remember the gameplay and it’s fine. Nothing special, it’s not up there with Streets of Rage or Final Fight, but it’s fun enough even if it does nothing new and copies pretty much everything from those two games (which, to be fair, are very similar already!).