You’re sitting around in a graveyard with your girlfriend — You know, just hanging out like you normally do in the graveyard, when suddenly a demon steals your girlfriend away. Totally annoying, right? So you put on your armor, pick up a sword, and fight your way to that giant evil castle where you’re pretty sure she is. Just keep going in the direction of the increasing number of demons, trolls, and zombies. That's the plot for Ghosts’ N Goblins.

This is a notoriously difficult and merciless game. Do you know someone who constantly whines about how easy games are nowadays? Put them in front of this game and don’t let them leave until they’ve beaten at least two levels. Some games are difficult just because they throw a bunch of things at you at once or make you react quickly. This game is actually pretty brilliant (read: sadistic) in its difficulty design. It knows just what you’ll want to do, just where you’ll want to jump, and it will put something terrible waiting for you in that perfect spot. It trains you through pain and mental anguish. Even on Casual, its still pretty challenging. Did I mention it has a fake ending? That’s right, beat this game and you’re rewarded with an ending that tells you this was all just a trick of Satan. Now you have to go through the entire game again. This is pretty much Demon’s Souls' great grandpa.

Is it fun though? I’d say there is a lot of enjoyment in finally learning the pattern in games like this. When you know where to jump, when to wait—when you’ve finally got the map memorized and you’re in the zone, that’s when these kinds of games get to be fun. That’s not necessarily the definition of fun in games nowadays, but it is a pretty pure and classic form of gameplay.

Section Z sets you out in space, in space-y corridors, and other space-inspired environments and has you shooting up alien bad guys/things/robots. It’s a pretty common theme among shooters of the time.

Somehow Section Z looks cleaner than many of the other games in the Arcade Cabinet, as if it were a high end PC game. Your nice, red spacesuit is a good contrast with the dark blues and greys of the scenery. Among shooters, it’s easy to pick out a screenshot of this game quickly.

I don’t like the turning mechanic in this game as much as games that just have a button assigned to fire in either direction. Pressing a button to turn around and then switching buttons again to fire just never really felt natural. I much prefer the mechanics of Gun.Smoke, which allow you to just press a button for the direction you’d like to fire.

Alright, I loved this game, if only for the wacky storyline I had going in my head. The character you control wears a red spacesuit with a blacked out helmet. That’s all you see of this person, but I swear he seems so depressed, like he’s fed up with this crappy space patrol gig he’s got going (he/she even looks this way in the official art, it’s kind of hilarious). In the animation for his sprite, he doesn’t even lift his gun until you press a button, and he just sort of lets the jetpack pull him along until you force him to reluctantly lift his weapon. I figure red spacesuit guy just got back from vacation and was hoping blue spacesuit guy was finally going to pull his weight and keep Section Z bug free and clean for once. But of course, noooooooo, you come back and you just have twice the work to do because blue spacesuit guy is always just half-assing his job, posting pictures of painted miniature models to Facebook, and flirting with his girlfriend while he’s supposed to be working.

Gun.Smoke is a classic Old West themed game where you are hunting down bad guys and collecting bounties. Funny thing is, the first time you got $10,000 as a bounty back in the day, you really could have just retired. But you keep going, gaining larger rewards for each criminal you track down.

Gun.Smoke is pretty bright and colorful for an Old West game. The criminal portraits are fun and a rather light-hearted cartoon style. Even the horse you can ride is kind of chubby and cute. It manages to make the constant shooting a little less, well, serious.

As mentioned before, Gun.Smoke has a nice game mechanic that has different firing directions assigned to different buttons. This is good and bad, however, if you want to fully utilize the controls. So while the (Circle) button will let you shoot right and the (Square) button lets you shoot left, pushing both together will let you do a spread shot. This is some pretty fancy button gymnastics unless you’re used to holding the controller on a flat surface and placing your hand on top instead of around the controller. If you have an arcade controller, that might make things a touch easier. You can get through the game without these button combinations, but it’s still hard to manage them with the PlayStation controller format if you want to attempt them.

This pack is pretty much my favorite pack in the Capcom Arcade Cabinet series so far. There’s a nice balance between classic platformer with Ghosts’ N Goblins, side-scrolling shooter with Section Z, and a top-scrolling shooter with Gun.Smoke. It would be nice to have some simultaneous two player games in here, but alas, many of those older arcade games didn’t have this feature for some reason or another. There’s still not a lot of staying power once you’ve beaten these games, unless you’re beating them on Normal arcade difficulty. Then it will probably take many hours of practice to get familiar enough with them to beat them.