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What is it?

Arcade Hits Pack: Gunblade NY & LA Machineguns is an arcade game compilation for Wii, featuring two arcade rail shooters: Gunblade NY: Special Air Assault Force and LA Machineguns: Rage of the Machines. It’s a budget-priced package with Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection functionality in its leaderboards. The games are similar, in that you are shooting from a fast-moving and agile airborne vehicle, and you are, for the most part, blowing up robots.

How does it play?

Both games are very simple. Everything is on rails, so all you need to do is aim and hold down the fire button. Either the A or B button will work, so if you choose to use just a Wii Remote, a Wii Zapper, or a Nyko Perfect Shot (the option I went with), you’re set up fine from the beginning. You’re given infinite bullets and infinite continues, as if you had an arcade machine set to free play, and the game continues from exactly where you died (everything just freezes until you say you want to continue).

Gunblade NY is easier than LA Machineguns in that you never have to worry about civilians, however the enemies seem to take more hits, bouncing about comically as you juggle them with your bullets. You can shoot everything that moves, and your ranking at the end of the stage is impacted by your score and accuracy, among other things. Gunblade has you saving NY from terrorist robots and LA Machineguns has you saving LA. Each game is very short, taking about 30 minutes for a playthrough.

How does it look and sound?

Gunblade NY looks like a high-end PlayStation 1 game with a phenomenal framerate. LA Machineguns looks like a competent PS2 game. There’s a lot more going on in LA Machineguns, in terms of incoming fire that needs to be shot down and flying enemies on screen, enemy vehicles of all kinds, things like that. Both games have a lot of motion in them as the camera swings back and forth and over and under the enemies. As cool as this looks to me, I can see people with 3D sickness having a real issue with this experience.

The music is effective and driving, but not wholly remarkable. The explosions and other sound effects are fine as well. The Wii Remote’s speaker is used for commands coming in over your radio, and it’s fortunate that this speech is mirrored on the screen with captions because it can be very hard to understand. This on-screen text is especially entertaining because it’s poorly localized. Hold you ground!

Some of the challenges of bringing old games like these home were handled in interesting ways. For example, I played this on a widescreen TV. Rather than cropping the image on the left and right, the developer chose to show more of the game in the outer edges, which looks a lot nicer. In an effort to keep this from giving widescreen players a different gameplay experience (think of the online leaderboards), the left and right margins are dead zones, in which you cannot aim to shoot enemies and any incoming fire does no damage. It made for a very strange experience during gameplay before I discovered this in the manual, because I had a hard time managing all the incoming fire, and yet it wasn’t doing damage to me.

How’s the replay value?

Gunblade has a ranking system that gives you promotions based on your performance on a play through. You can go all the way from Police Officer to Chief of Police. Reaching certain ranks unlocks new weapons to use in the game, which can be switched during play using the d-pad, control stick, or Z button. The manual says you can get demoted if you do poorly enough as well, which would kind of suck. Gunblade also has Score Attack Remix, an additional mode that takes away your continues and lets you play a single player time-limited version of each stage for points.

The drop-in drop-out multiplayer in the game works well. I didn’t have a friend to play with (boo-hoo) so I just grabbed a second Wii Remote and dual wielded my way through a stage. Incoming attacks hit the screen in different places, and damage is split between the left and right halves of the screen, corresponding to the first and second players. When one player runs out of life, they’re gone from the game until they choose to drop back in.

If you’re a fan of arcade shooters like this, you’ll enjoy the game. All of the replay value comes from climbing the largely empty leaderboards (yay, I’m third on my first playthrough!) and maximizing your score by improving your accuracy and minimizing deaths, both of yourself and of civilians in LA Machineguns. If you don’t enjoy playing through short games like this over and over to improve your result, this may not be the game you’re looking for.

Is it worth it?

If you have fond memories of these two arcade games, you’ll probably find Arcade Hits Pack a good value at $30. Sega did a good job of bringing these games over to Wii with some good console-specific features. Just don’t expect a fully current-gen experience out of this, as the games are a few years old already: Gunblade NY is from 1995, and LA Machineguns is from 1997. This set makes a nice companion on your shelf for The House of the Dead 2 & 3.

Three out of five.