Wow, Blaze have really taken the opportunity to milk the availability of Toaplan’s game library, haven’t they? With four arcade collections solely featuring Toaplan titles, is this cartridge worth getting, or are we now scraping the bottom of the barrel?

Thankfully, there’s still some gems in Toaplan’s history; it does feel like the selection may be getting a bit thin now, however. Just six games feature on here, and one of them isn’t even an arcade version, bizarrely.

The title in question is the 8-bit port of Sky Shark, and as good as it is, we already had the arcade version in Toaplan Arcade 1. So this version’s inclusion here feels a bit cheeky, and almost feels like it’s just padding out the rather slender number of games on the cartridge.

That said, the other shoot ’em ups (yes, even more of them!) in this collection are great, but it is tough not to feel at least a bit of shmup fatigue on these Toaplan collections. Of course, the company was widely known and acclaimed for their shoot ’em up output.

So I suppose it’s silly to complain about Dogyuun and Grind Stormer, as they’re both superb.

The other three games included are pretty good too. Despite a nightmare inducing character select screen and a weird variety of powers, Snow Bros 2 is fantastic, and even supports 4 players simultaneously if you’re playing on the Evercade VS.

Pipi and Bibi’s is a sort of Elevator Action-style platformer; in its original arcade incarnation, it featured some attempts at titillating imagery, but Blaze have opted to make everything altogether more innocent. Though it wasn’t exactly arousing or pornographic by modern standards, it’s a bit weird that Blaze have been so puritanical about this and haven’t even offered the option to unlock this ‘feature’. The Evercade is a machine broadly aimed at and sold to middle aged adults, so it does seem like an odd choice. Still, it’s a fun game, even without the boobs.

Lastly, there’s the incredibly eccentric Knuckle Bash, which is well worth playing. Particularly as one of the characters is blatantly Elvis. Thank you very much.

Anyway, as good as they’ve been, for the most part, thankfully it seems that Blaze have finished with their Toaplan collections for now. We’ve got some really exciting arcade cartridges ahead; Neo Geo and Taito, for example, each of which I can’t wait to get my hands on!

You can buy Toaplan Arcade 4 from Amazon.

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