Arabian Magic
Released: 1992
Pitch: Non-stop action in the mystic world of Arabian Nights.
Arabian Magic is a decent belt-scrolling brawler. It's nice to see a different theme when often these kinds of games feature urban or sci-fi settings. There are four playable characters which are technically distinct but play very similarly. You can also occasionally get a genie lamp that will summon a generic muscled djinn or one of the defeated bosses (a nice touch, that) to briefly fight for you. The game suffers from the typical shortcomings of the genre, like heavily overused enemy types and cheap deaths, but with infinite continues it's fun to work through it. My nine-year-old son and I played through the whole thing and enjoyed ourselves. The one thing that really surprised me about this game was the music. It's pretty good!
I remember playing this game on Taito Legends 2. The character designs were pretty neat.
I'm going to list all the games I really liked on Taito Legends 2. Hopefully you can try them!
Cameltry
Cleopatra's Fortune
Dungeon Magic
Elevator Action Returns
G-Darius
KiKi KaiKai (later games were Pocky and Rocky in the US. Did you know a new Pocky and Rocky game is coming out this year?)
Kuri Kinton
Liquid Kids
Metal Black
Puchi Carat
Puzzle Bobble 2
Ramais
Space Invaders 95
The Xbox and PS2 versions had a couple of exclusive games. Unfortunately I didn't have an Xbox so I didn't get to play Cadash and Bubble Symphony on those. But at least the PS2 version had G-Darius!
I'm definitely looking forward to more games on this second collection over the first. I'll be getting to all these...alphabetically lol. It looks like there are quite a few good shmups in here and I hope the arcade nature of these will let me power through with infinite credits since I won't have the time to really put in the time and get good at them.
Love that art style. I played this side-scrolling brawler before. Pretty good, I thought.
Judging by some of the youtube videos I saw, I think this was four player in the arcade. That would have been pretty cool!
Like that DnD: Chronicles of Mystera.