Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced

Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced is a compilation of selected Konami arcade classics that the publisher brought to the Game Boy Advance as a joint package of several genre-different but equally old titles. The collection includes the shmup Gradius, standing alongside the platformer Circus Charlie, the action game Rush'n Attack, the fighting game Yie Ar Kung-Fu, and another classic cabinet, Scramble. Each game is presented as a faithful reconstruction of its arcade original, including period visuals, control scheme, and the level of difficulty that old-timers remember from the arcade machines.

Gradius in this collection offers the typical horizontal shoot 'em up that made the series famous with its distinctive, later widely copied power-up system chosen from a bar rather than picked up instantly, forcing the player to plan which upgrade to activate and when, while organic and mechanical enemy formations pile up on screen along with imposing bosses at the end of sections. The other titles in the collection round out the picture of early Konami output from the late seventies and early eighties, so the package also works as a neat cross-section of the company's arcade lineup at the time. Technically these are straightforward, faithful ports without major extra tweaks.

Reviewers praised the compilation mainly as an affordable way to play several historically significant titles at once for a reasonable price, even though none of the games individually offered anything fans of the arcade era hadn't already known from other ports or emulation. For the GBA library, it was one of several packages making older arcade titles accessible to a new generation of handheld players, who could thereby discover the roots of genres they only knew from more modern sequels. Today the collection is a pleasant entry point into early Konami arcade output, with Gradius clearly the standout piece from a shmup fan's perspective.