It shouldn’t be that hard to play old Armored Core games

Armored Core 6: Burning Rubicon has faithfully put FromSoftware’s Armored Core series back in the spotlight. Fans new and old beat bosses, paint wild mechs and joke about Handler Walter, and soon they will be hungry for more. And you’d think, with a series stretching back to 1997 with nearly twenty entries, it’d be a cinch to go back and play… each of them. But you would be wrong!

One of the earlier Armored games Core today’s games require the use of consoles from two, three or four generations ago: not a single item is available for download on modern consoles or PC.

You can download and play Armored Core: Verdict Day (think AC5.5), as long as you still have a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. You can also still buy the original Armored core on the PlayStation Store, as long as you have a PS3 to play it. But that’s it!

Now if you’re a total AC convert and want to play as many games in the series as possible, tracking down a PS3 with backward compatibility with PS2 will allow you to play almost the entire back catalog as long as you get your hands on the physical copies. Emulation is another route, but that’s legally unclear and involves some technical savvy that new fans of the series might miss.

The simple solution is for FromSoftware to make the series available for download on modern consoles. Maybe the effort didn’t make sense years ago, but with Burning Rubicon wild success, there is no more excuse! FromSoftware has pushed the future of Armored Core – now it must revive its past.