Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Midway Arcade Treasures

Written by John Scalzo on August 26, 2003

First Impressions: I'd buy that for a dollar! Hell, I'd buy this for a hundred dollars...

Last year's Activision Anthology was a fantastic idea by the good folks at Activision. They've been doing this video game thing since the Atari and the very birth of the home console so putting out a collection of all those classics was a no brainer. Even better was the game's budget price (An MSRP of $30 then, can be found for much less now) and huge quantities of games on one disc (48 in all). The people at Midway were so impressed that they are striking back with their own compilation set appropriately called Midway Arcade Treasures. And what Midway collection would be complete without the greatest Midway game of them all: Smash TV.

I love Smash TV. To borrow a phrase from a famous poem: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." I loved the game's never ending sense of danger. Enemies and bullets filling the screen. Monsters that just did not want to die. That split second decision of whether to run across the screen for the invincibility shield or not that seemed to drag for minutes. The fact that each room opened with a phrase like "Total carnage" or "Laser death squads!"

There's much more but somehow I doubt that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had video games (especially one like Smash TV) in mind when she first wrote that poem. I never played much of the game when it was first released in the arcades in 1990. No, I would first discover the game with the excellent port on the Super NES. And then rediscovering a port of the original arcade game years later on the PSone compilation Arcade Party Pak. I discovered two things. One, the developers had actually made the game easier on the Super NES (but still one of the hardest games ever), because this mother was hard. And two, Smash TV is one of the greatest games ever created.

That's quite the pedigree for a game that was loosely based off of the Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man. It's hard to quantify just what makes Smash TV feel like the ultimate game for me. Maybe it's the unique double stick setup that allowed your character to run in one direction but shoot in any direction you wanted. I know the game's non-stop action had plenty to do with it. Or maybe it was the sheer frustration of constantly dying (always punctuated by a loud "DAMN!") that led to total determination to beat the game. Or possibly it was the show's smarmy host that said things like "Big money! Big prizes! I love it!" as he sent you off into a room full of killer robots.

There's much more but I'm sure most of you out there on the Interweb are sick of bearing witness to my sloppy wet kiss to Smash TV.

Digital Eclipse, the development team behind Arcade Party Pak, one of Midway's last compilations is also behind Arcade Treasures. And if the accuracy of the graphics and sounds in that game is any indication then I have high hopes for this collection. Unfortunately you can't use that game as a stopgap between now and the release of Midway Arcade Treasures as it's one of the handful of games that doesn't really work on a PS2. But with a roster of a paltry six games, Midway Arcade Treasures should blow it out of the water. Treasures will include: 720, Blaster, Bubbles, Defender, Defender II, Gauntlet, Joust, Joust II, Klax, Marble Madness, Paperboy, Rampage, Rampart, RoadBlasters, Robotron 2084, Satan's Hollow, Sinistar, Smash TV, Splat!, Spy Hunter, Super Sprint, Toobin', and Vindicators. Basically every game before the Mortal Kombat era. Also missing from the list is Total Carnage, Smash TV's inferior quasi-sequel.

Moving away from Smash TV, most of the games in this collection were (and still are) fantastic arcade games that proved Midway's gaming metal. I'm particularly excited about the chance to play Paperboy and Marble Madness again, two games that are often overlooked on collections like this. And I'm sure one Mr. Adam Wolcott will be more than happy to get his grubby claws on Spy Hunter. This collection really has something for everyone and a it's price ($20) is definitely for everyone.

Rounding out the package will be a collection of DVD quality interviews with the developers of each of these classics. Midway has posted a clip of the Smash TV interview on their website and not surprisingly it was a reused clip from the interviews on Arcade Party Pak. I hope there's new content, the developers of Smash TV talked about a true sequel on the Arcade Party Pak disc and I'd love the hear more, but somehow I doubt we'll get anything new.