Arcade Classics 3D

Game Info

When one hears the term “Arcade Classic” one tends to think of heavy hitters like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong or a number of other household name games. One does not usually bring up Tetris or Columns or Bejeweled. But apparently that’s what came to mind for Enjoy Gaming when they put together Arcade Classics 3D for the Nintendo 3DS eshop.

This collection features six different games to play in not-really-necessary 3D. For your price of admission you get clones of Asteroids, Bejewled, Breakout, Bust-A-Move, Columns, & Tetris. All classic games, sure. But not really arcade games, save a couple. Even so, variations of these games have been around for ages and most people have probably played some form of most of these, whether they are a gamer or not.

And no doubt they have played better versions of them as well. These are very basic versions of the games in the truest sense. There’s no innovation or changes to the games to speak of, and in some cases, they are made worse. In the case of Jewels (as they so unoriginally call the Bejweled clone), every time you make a match, a bar of fills up. When the bar is full you advance to the next level. But your current board is destroyed and you get a new one. The only difference I could tell in the levels is that you need more matches to fill the bar. There’s no power-ups or special happenings from 4 or 5 piece matches. To make matters worse, you can’t even cancel a selection if you accidentally select the wrong jewel. If you try to move a jewel where it doesn’t match you lose a credit and losing enough causes game over. Ditto this entire paragraph for the Columns clone Swap.  One play on each of these was enough to know I wouldn’t touch them again.

This dumbed down versioning continues all the way through. Blocks (the Tetris clone) has the same “fill the bar to advance levels” mechanic and the same boring “nothing new here” look and feel. Though they did remove the “next piece” box, so I guess there is something new, even it is a bad new. Bounce & Break has very basic levels that don’t inspire replays. Ditto with Pop It Up. The balls you have to destroy are too big for the narrower play field, which severely limits the kind of arrangements that can created. And in turn the fun that can be had. The only game that retains some level fun that you might want to play for more than a curious glance is the Asteroids clone Impacts. The art-style is actually decent and fun to look at. Of all the games in the collection, this is the only one I may want to return to again. All games keep track of just one high score, and that list of scores is not very well called out, so replay value is low.

Besides the above mentioned Impacts, the rest of the visuals are just generic background scenes behind ugly game board pieces. The 3D is a little strong and gave me a slight headache a couple of times. I usually don’t have trouble with the 3D visuals, but I had to turn these off. Not that you really need them for anything in the game. The soundtrack is a rejected day spa radio station with feel-good zen vibes to relax your mind and hopefully help you forget that you actually paid money for this.

THE RECOMMENDATION

I can’t really recommend anyone pay the current $2.99 asking price for this collection. All the games included can be found done much better and usually for free. If you really need to get your quick casual game and/or high score on, save your money and find a better, different option. This is just a quick cash-in and nothing else.