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> Results: Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play
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If you are of a certain age, you likely stuck too much of your newspaper route money in quarter form into glowing boxes at one of the many arcades that sprung up all over the country in the early 1980's. Retro gaming has been popular for many years, and there have been many, many compilations produced to capitalize on the trend. Most of these collections offer games that were popular across several years and that span several genres, giving a little something to appeal to most everyone.
Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play is the latest collection, offering 21 games including some that were very popular in the arcades. Many of these games have been changed in some way to adapt to the handheld screen and control scheme, but gameplay remains largely the same. Many of the games also have wireless multiplayer capabilities to allow you to experience a game like Gauntlet on a wireless network. The PSP has an excellent set of controls for a handheld in terms of adapting to old arcade games, and each game allows you to remap the controls to your liking.  There were several games that greatly appealed to me from this collectionﾗgames that played in my mind like a recap of driving for an afternoon to the arcade in high school in 1982. These games included Sinistar, Arch Rivals, Gauntlet, Joust, Defender, Spy Hunter and Rampage. These were the games I rushed to play, and that gave me an immediate taste of the mixed quality of the collection. Arch Rivals is greatﾗa simple 2-on-2 basketball game with no foul rules (thus the ﾑpunch' button). It's translated very well and is loads of fun. Then I loaded up one of my all-time favorites, Sinistarﾗand it's awful. The sound is distorted, but it's the graphics that really bother me. The arcade game featured a screen that was taller than it was wideﾗsimilar to games like Spy Hunter. But unlike what the developers did with that game (i.e. put stuff on the sides rather than the top), Sinistar is faithfully ported, meaning that over a third of the screen is filled with black bars, while the game itself is squished into a very small space that makes playing very difficult and the radar useless. That's a grave disappointment, and not the last one. Most of the games are a compromise. To play Joust competently, I need to use the direction keys rather than the analog stick. Most of the other games require compromises as well. There is no game that made it unscathed to the PSP. The one possible exception would be Gauntlet, which seems made for this hardware. The controls work well, the screen fit is very good, and the wireless dungeon crawling is as fun as crowding four people around the old arcade machine! Many people will be immediately attracted to the Mortal Kombat games, as those were very popular in arcades throughout the 90's. It is obvious that the publishers wanted to feature these games, and with the first game of the series they seem to do a very good job. Sound and control work well, and the fights progress nicely with virtually no load times or pauses. However, Mortal Kombat 2 lags and has sound distortion while Mortal Kombat 3 is even worse. These games seem like they needed more polish and optimization to run correctly on the PSP, or perhaps they were simply too taxing for the hardware.  Here is the complete list of games in the collection: 720-degrees, Arch Rivals, Championship Sprint, Cyberball 2072, Defender, Gauntlet, Joust, Klax, Marble Madness, Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, PaperBoy, Rampage, Rampart, Sinistar, Spy Hunter, Toobin', Wizard of Wor, Xenophobe, Xybots. Of these all but Spy Hunter, Sinistar, Defender, Paperboy, and 720-degrees have wireless play modes. Every compilation, especially one spanning so many games, has winners and losers. However, Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play has more losers than winners, making it a very difficult game to recommend. I found that most of the games I cared about worked well enough that I could enjoy them, and a few were an absolute blast whose flaws were quickly forgotten. As I'm playing other games on the PSP, I keep finding myself pulling out this compilation and playing a quick round of Arch Rivals or Gauntlet or one of the others. Whether you enjoy this collection or not is entirely dependent on the implementation of your favorite included gamesﾗbecause even at the budget price you need to find more than one game here to make the price worth paying. 
The compilation is rated M for the Mortal Kombat games, which have been in arcades and available to kids since 1992. They feature loads of intense violence and blood that would be rated M if released today. This breaks down to being a collection of eighteen games that deserve an E rating and three games with an M. Looking at the overall collection, my kids wanted to head straight for Mortal Kombat 3, so this is for the 14 and older group.
This review edited by Dave Long Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play |
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