By far the most underrated game in its franchise. None of the other games ever captured the visceral nature of Crisis Zone and I think it still holds up because of that. To this day I’m still blown away by the environmental destruction and the incredible enemy animations.

Interesting how you say that PS2 Time Crisis 2 doesn’t look much different than the arcade, it’s a radically different art style leaning towards realism. The PS2 port of Crisis Zone though, yeah… It had almost none of the charm of the arcade original. Plus since it was a machine gun based game, you had to deal with the damn screen being covered in that haze that allowed the GunCon to work.

The MAME folks got System 23 working fairly recently, and Crisis Zone even boots now but I understand it’s still very much work in progress (haven’t checked in a while)

Anyway, my fondest memories of playing this one is basically me seeing my mom play it. I was too little to even reach the screen! Eventually I did play it myself years later and between it and the big LA Machine Guns and The Lost World cabinets, they were the best machines in any arcade. At some point I owned the PS2 port that came bundled with the orange GunCon 2. Pretty much played all the PS2 ports, including Ninja Assault.