|
Midway delves back into its past. Following the success of the first Midway Arcade Treasures, Midway has promptly released this update. In this game, you’ll find pretty faithful recreations of many Midway games of yore, including Mortal Kombat II, Mortal Kombat 3, Spy Hunter II, Narc, and many others. All in all, there are 20 games included in the $20 package, which is a great deal.
As I mentioned above, there are 20 games included in the game but there are a few that stand out a bit more than others. It is clear that Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3 are the highlights of this compilation, and both games play reasonably similar to the 16-bit releases. You’ll also find Gauntlet II, the sequel to the game that popularized the four-player action-RPG; Rampage World Tour, which is pretty much a destroying sim; Spy Hunter II which is similar to current Spy Hunter games in that you have a behind-the-car view and have to defeat over vehicular enemies; and Narc is the extremely politically incorrect sidescroller that Midway is re-inventing sometime soon with the new but exactly titled Narc.
Aside from these six games, which I spent much of my time with and suspect that most will do the same, you’ll find 14 additional titles at your disposal. Going in alphabetical order now: APB is a pretty standard driving title, Arch Rivals is an unruly basketball game, Championship Spring is another pretty standard driving game and Cyberball 2072 is the bomb-for-a-ball football title. Moreover, Hard Drivin’ is a simple polygon-based driving game, Kosmik Krooz’r is a shooter, Pit Fighter is a primitive fighting game, Primal Rage is a more involved fighting game involving dinosaurs and Timber is a strange game about cutting timber. Moving forward, Total Carnage is the spiritual sequel to Smash TV; Wacko which is another shooter; Wizards of Wor, a shooter; Xenophobe, another space-based shooter, and lastly, Xybots a 3D maze title.
While the games play rather well, there are a few glitches here and there, although most of these are nitpickings. You’ll find that nearly all games suffer from frame rate issues at some point, while some like Pit Fighter seem to be on a super-speed frame-rate. There are also a few instances of flickering, particularly in the Mortal Kombat games. While collectors will no doubt notice these right away, most casual gamers (which are probably the target demographic for this release) won’t really notice.
Overall though, the games look pretty good… or at least faithful to the source material. The same can be said about the game’s audio component.
Aside from the actual games, Midway Arcade Treasures 2 includes many memorabilia for the games including some video, interviews, artwork and fact sheets for the game which explained how profitable the publisher thought the game would be. All in all, its nice to see the work of yesteryear.
Midway Arcade Treasures 2 isn’t the best compilation that money can buy. For $20 though, you’ll be getting a lot of games which more or less function very well. If you are even remotely interested (particularly in MKII and MK3) be sure to pick it up. -- Adam Nunez, PGNx Media
---- Oct 22, 2004
|
