Saturday, August 11, 2012

Deluxe Is Not Always Better


I used to play the original Elevator Action all the time. The concept had the player controlling secret agent Otto in a 2D vertical scroller as he went from the roof of a building dozens of floors down to escape from the basement in a cool car. Along the way you used elevators and escalators to descend while finding secret plans behind doors, jumping and shooting enemy spies. It was fairly simple but I loved it, and I was good at it. I could play for hours on just a few quarters, and always got through more than a few buildings.

I think there's an NES version of this but I recall it was just not the same. There just certain tricks to the arcade game that just didn't carry over. This seems to be by far the case with the PS3 version, called Elevator Action Deluxe. The deluxe in the title refers to better I guess, or at least it seems that's what the creators want you to think. I think not. If PS3 made the old arcade game, just the way it was, I would be happy as a cat in a tuna factory, but that wasn't the case.

In this case, the deluxe meant 3D rather than 2D, giving the game a whole new, and not necessarily better look. They also added in bombs and bigger guns, but when you can't ride on top of the elevators and do other such tricks, what's the point? This version is still fun to play, easy to beat, but if I'm being honest, I'd rather play the original. Anyone know where they still have an arcade machine of this one?

1 comment:

Ray Cornwall said...

If you can do arcade emulation on your Mac, I can probably find the ROM for Elevator Action...