The home port of the classic Arcade game! Despite what a certain Irate Gamer might tell you, this is pretty decent adaptation of the arcade game, doing the best they could with the hardware. The attacks are slightly stripped down but the original is already pretty simplistic so it's not a huge deal. I appreciate the new levels and unique enemies to this version, making it stand out as its own thing from the cabinet version. That said, the bosses are very repetitive, being bulked up considerably while having less options for looping them. Every boss fight boils down to jump kick spam if you want to survive, with only a handful of shake ups. Still, for the era it's made for it's perfectly serviceable and better than I was expecting.

One thing I noticed which may be a Cowabunga Collection problem is unresponsive controls. I could only find one button config that allowed me to do the Special Attack by pressing jump and attack simultaneously in a consistent fashion. Even using Keyboard controls eliminating the chance I'm not pressing the buttons at the same time still had it be very inconsistent. With all the other available enhancements, it seems odd there isn't a macro for the special attack.