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I’m going to start this review of Final Fight: Double Impact, which is a new downloadable game for PSN and XBLA, by taking some shots at Nintendo. As a fan of Capcom’s classic coin-op brawler Final Fight, I was pretty annoyed at the SNES port, which omitted one of the playable characters. I was even more annoyed when they released Final Fight Guy, which omitted a different character and brought back Guy.

I’m over it. It’s been, you know, a long time, and I forgive Capcom for making such decisions in that limited era of home console gaming. Still, I have a facepalm print, courtesy Nintendo, for publishing both those games on Virtual Console at eight dollars a piece and never offering us the actual arcade original. Yes, it’s a Capcom game, but Nintendo and Capcom will both tell you who calls the shots on what comes out.

So don’t even think about dumping $16 on that VC SNES crap. Instead, buy Final Fight: Double Impact, a $10 compilation of the arcade original versions of both Final Fight and Magic Sword, with a surprising amount of extras thrown in to sweeten the deal. It totally makes up for that Virtual Console mess, and it easily beats grabbing Final Fight One on GBA and playing it on a Game Boy Player.

Booting the game, you’re given the option to choose between Final Fight and Magic Sword. You’ll see the classic arcade upright and hear the ambient sounds. Press square (X on 360) to swap to Magic Sword, or choose from a list of options for Final Fight, including playing a traditional offline game or creating or jumping into an online game. Options are varied, particularly in the presentation area. By default, you play the games as shown above, framed in their cabinet, curved and blurry like in the arcade. You can also play them framed in black, or scaled proportionally, or stretched to fill your widescreen display, with or without smoothing. You can even choose between remixed music or the original retro-tastic style. I went for proportionally scaled with the enhanced music, and enjoyed it just fine.

Both games have an assortment of trophies (achievements on 360, of course) as well as a longer list of challenges, which are like trophies but without any value outside the game. What’s interesting about these is that they’re surprisingly verbose. If there’s one for clearing a certain number of points on level 30 in Magic Sword (there is, in fact), it tells you when you enter level 30 that the challenge is set. When you succeed or fail, you’re notified.

Succeeding at these challenges unlocks a set of tiered bonuses within the game’s vault for every stage of the game. These are art items, and are fun to look at but not terribly compelling as unlockables. Surprisingly, a lot of the art is actually fan art from both Final Fight and Street Fighter games, but there is also original Capcom concept art and some comics from these as well. There’s even an episode of a Final Fight referencing animated Street Fighter TV show, which is just as awful as you’d expect.

Magic Sword is a new experience for me, but it’s a lot of fun. You climb through about 50 levels of a tower, some of which are seconds long and some of which are minutes. If you play on your own, grabbing keys and opening doors will net you an assistant, an NPC in any one of a number of classes who will follow you and attack when you attack, supporting you with arrows or magic or whatever they have. The game is very fast and chaotic, and a lot of fun with multiple players. The shining glory of this game may be its hilarious localization. Imprisoned NPCs behind doors beg, “evacuate me,” “get rid of me,” “take me out,” and “get me escape.” Just watch out if you’re playing with your game open to online players, because it doesn’t pause if you enter the menu and your time can run out, ending the game. The game even features multiple endings, which is pretty neat, and much more manageable when you’re not using quarters, and you can save your game.

Custom Game mode lets you load your game from anywhere it’s been saved and make that a local multiplayer experience or set up some basic options (such as open or closed session, difficulty level) and play online, either as a host or joining an existing match. You can also start a local game and leave the session open, allowing either anyone at all or just invited friends to jump into your game whenever you want. Using the Jump In option from the menu, you can get right into any in-progress open online games. Weeks before launch when testing, I couldn’t find any matches, which is not surprising. I did, however, appear on the top 10 on the leaderboard for Magic Sword, which is something that I will probably never see happen again.

Both these games are a lot of fun, and they hold up very well if you’re a fan of these kinds of games. The fact that you have unlimited continues here, as if you brought a thousand dollars in quarters to the arcade, really makes these games far more relaxing than they were all those years ago. At the same time, the challenges for unlocking things in the vault, as well as the trophy list, makes for a great deal of things to do. The online play sweetens the deal even more, and an adjustable difficulty slider is really a great thing too. Beating Magic Sword lets you access a level select when you start a new game, which makes hitting those challenges that much easier.

I can’t find anything wrong with the way these games were compiled. The options are suitably robust and the gameplay seems to be the same as it was years ago. As long as you enjoy the source material, I think you’ll love Final Fight: Double Impact. I do.

Four and a half out of five.