IREM, under its I’MAX imprint, releases the arcade compilation IREM Arcade Classics for the Sony Playstation in Japan only, containing the ’80s coin-op arcade games Motorace USA, Spartan-X, and the football game 10-Yard Fight. 
The Game: Yet another retro arcade collection, Irem Arcade Classics gathers three cult classics from the coin-op gurus at Japan’s now rather obscure IREM Corporation. Titles include Zippy Race (better known to U.S. players as Motorace USA), 10-Yard Fight (probably the best attempt at video football to hit the arcades in the 1980s) and Spartan-X. There are some dandy customization options, as well the ability to view a video of Spartan-X as played by a master. (I’Max, 1996, for Playstation; also available Sega Saturn)
Memories: One of the holy grails of my unending search for classic arcade joy on the Sony Playstation, IREM Arcade Classics was Released only for the Japanese market, and is actually a sweet little package, boasting some of the best arcade emulation ever to hit the Playstation. Damn shame the rest of the world missed out on it – quite a few of us remember 10-Yard Fight and Motorace USA.
It’s the latter of those two games which drew me into a lengthy search for this game. Compared to IREM Arcade Classics, finding Nichibutsu Arcade Classics was a cakewalk. It wasn’t a large pressing to begin with, and furthermore, unlike a lot of games which are considered rare, this one’s so fun that very few people who have one are willing to part with it.
IREM Arcade Classics is a beautiful thing. I can now play Motorace USA on my Playstation. Sure, I could get it to run on MAME before, but the speed was off, the colors were off…as often happens with emulators, there was just something not right about the end result. Playing it on the PS1, however, is arcade nirvana. Motorace USA was always a favorite of mine, and now it’s back, baby – kicking my butt in a big way. As it should be.
I’m not quite as nutty over 10-Yard Fight or the early martial arts fighter Spartan-X, but I have seen them and I can report that their emulation is equally flawless. The graphics of the three games are exceptionally sharp – they’re as colorful as they were in the arcade, and furthermore the proportions of the display – even a vertically oriented display like Motorace‘s – are correct. Like Namco Museum‘s vertical-monitor titles, you have the option of a 90-degree rotated view for 10-Yard Fight and Motorace USA, essentially using the entire monitor the way the coin-ops originally did. But unlike Namco Museum‘s clumsy framing of vertical displays with obtrusive “border graphics”, IREM Arcade Classics just turns things 90 degrees, makes them only a little bit smaller, and gives you the maximum un-messed-with arcade fun permissible by federal law.
This also leads us to a discussion of the game’s coolest feature as well as its biggest blunders. Each game has its own Options menu, allowing the player to play arcade operator for a bit: how many lives per game? What difficulty level? Can the game be continued from where it left off? One of the neatest features is the ability to switch between the original music and a much more modernized version of the same tunes. Motorace USA‘s jaunty but repetitive ditties become a surf-rock anthem that plays well against the game’s west coast backdrops (note that the game begins in “Los Angels”). The only problem is that custom settings can’t be saved – nor can high scores, thanks to a total lack of any memory card compatibility whatsoever.
That’s not the worst of the boo-boos, however. Once you have selected one of the three games, you’re stuck with it – there’s no way to exit a game and return to the main menu without resetting the Playstation itself. Granted, IREM Arcade Classics was a very early game, released mere months after the Playstation itself, so the game’s developers probably expected the consumers to overlook that one oddity in favor the exceptional game play. Y’know what? I can buy that. It probably just seems like more of a pain to me because I’m having to use a boot disk to play the game on an American model Playstation, necessitating a couple of disk-swaps to get the game back up and running. It’s a failing I can live with, however.
If you can find it, I highly recommend Irem Arcade Classics. I hope you can forgive me for ranting about it endlessly – it’s really not all for the sake of a big brag. For years, while waiting patiently to find a copy of this game, I kept looking for sources of info about it on the web, and turned up nothing – no screen grabs, no box shot, nothing. This review is here to address that gap of useful information for the next gamer who decides to undertake the hunt.
A Phosphor Dot Fossil examined by Earl Green