My big beef with Capcom, as a mobile fan, is that I never really know what level of effort to expect from them. I consider them responsible for some of the finest ports to iOS (Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies) and some of the worst (Mega Man Mobile, Mega Man X). Since the games they choose to port are selected from their excellent library of classics, it's hard not to get excited when they announce something new is coming. But somewhere in the back of my brain, I worry that we're going to end up with another unreasonably poor effort. Such was the case when Capcom recently announced that they would be bringing four of their arcade classics to the platform. Well, the first one is here, and I'm happy to say that we got the good Capcom this time. While it's not perfect, 1942 Mobile [$1.99] is a very good re-creation of Capcom's classic vertical shoot-em-up, with all that implies.
So, let's get the important part out of the way first. This is a good port. There's no obvious lag as we saw in the Mega Man ports, the music is intact, and everything seems to be running at the right speed. I can't say with certainty that this is the arcade version, but if it isn't, whoever did the port did their homework. I compared it with the version of the game included on the old Capcom Classics Collection and other than the mobile version looking a whole lot sharper, I couldn't spot any obvious differences. The mobile version includes a new casual mode that gives you...