Full Review: I'd buy that for a dollar!
In the days of yore (read: any time before 2002), game compilations would weigh in at a max of six games. And most sat pretty in the three to four range. That's what happens when disk space and the common mentality of bigger, shinier, and newer comes into play. Old games were for the past, or for people who were willing to blow into their NES for hours to get five minutes against Abobo. So that's why I stand up and salute companies like Activision (with their 50 title Activision Anthology, the inspiration for this collection), Capcom (with their twelve game Mega Man Anniversary Collection) and Midway, with the 24 title Midway Arcade Treasures.
Reviewing a game like Midway Arcade Treasures is not an easy task. With so many titles it takes an everything to everyone approach to gaming. Everyone wil find at least a handful of titles to like here. Gauging the accuracy of the translation from arcades to the PS2 is also not for the faint of heart. Due to the range of years that a compilation this big covers, I haven't played many of these games inside an arcade in years. In fact, any familiarity I have with most of these games are with the NES, Super NES or Genesis versions.
So I did what I thought was best and just dove right in. I relived some of my greatest video game memories with Marble Madness, Rampage and Paperboy. I discovered the crazy life of a bartender for the first time in Root Beer Tapper. I played Klax for the first time in over ten years. And those five games only scratched the surface of this collection. It's amazing how quickly you can forget how much fun guiding a marble past obstacles, smashing a city with a mutant gorilla, and delivering newspapers can be. Then you sit back and marvel; "Wow, there were other puzzle games besides Tetris released in the late 80s."
And then there's Smash TV. Smash TV is one of my all time favorite games and it sits in the Midway Arcade Treasures collection as the most recent game in the set. Based on the underrated Ah-nuld classic The Running Man, Smash TV featured a futuristic (it took place in 1999!) game show that plopped one or two unlucky souls into an arena populated by roving gangs of mutants and robots armed with a variety of guns competing for cash and prizes. Frantic action at it's finest, Smash TV took an overhead view and a dual stick control scheme that allowed your character to run in any direction and shoot in any direction at the same time. It wasn't revolutionary, Robotron (which is also included on this disc) did it first. But Smash TV did it perfect.
Smash TV on Midway Arcade Treasures does it close to perfect. The graphics and sounds are recreated perfectly. The game's frantic action is recreated perfectly. The pace however, leaves something to be desired. Slowdown plagues Smash TV when the screen is swarming with enemies. Much more slowdown than was evident in the earlier Super NES version of the game. But even with this slowdown, I still love Smash TV. It plays well enough and the dual stick control scheme translates well to the PS2. It could be worse.
This is not the case for some of the other games in the package. Some odd choices were made in an attempt to map unique arcade control setups to the PS2 controller. For example, every racing game that featured a wheel and pedal (like Super Sprint and Spy Hunter) use the right stick to control your speed with no option to change the configuration. Figuring out the right sensitivity for the stick takes some time and is no where near as intuitive as a wheel and pedal or including the ability to make a face button the gas is. The controls for Toobin are also needlessly complex. While I'm sure the arcade edition featured a truly special interface, Toobin on the NES was a beautiful game with a simple control scheme. Here you have to decide which hand to push with, which direction to push in and which direction to point your feet in. This is no easy feat for those of us that never played the arcade version.
But again, as a whole, this compilation includes a huge number of fantastic games and after all of these years they still play great. Gauntlet, Joust, 720, the list goes on and on. There's no use arguing over graphics and sounds because this is how these games are supposed to look and supposed to sound. If you could build your own arcade machine and have a copy of Midway Arcade Treasures running non-stop, there's a good chance no one would know the difference. The only way they could know is the fact that Midway Arcade Treasures gives you unlimited "quarters" to play your game with. While that's great, the only true arcade experience is glancing over at the dwindling pile of change sitting on the cabinet and being under the constant threat that your parents will come back and say those dreaded words: "Its time to go home."
The Activision Anthology earned bonus points by recreating the bedroom of an 80s mallrat right down to the music on the tape deck. Everything about AA's presentation was top notch and this is one point where AA takes the upper hand. The menu for Arcade Treasures is terrible. An ancient Egyptian motif is used to highlight the fact that the games are "treasures" and hieroglyphic symbols stand in for a list of games. Clever, we get it, now use icons that aren't completely foreign even to people who know what game they're looking for.
Where the two big time collections come together again is with their packages of bonus material. Each game includes some combination of History, Trivia, Video Interviews or Artwork that tries to tell the early story of Midway. Most of it is recycled from previous, smaller Midway collections, but unless you own all of them there's going to be some new stuff here. And it's all pretty fun and informative.
