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Activision Anthology Adds Homebrew Games, Classics Lauded
Thanks to GameSpot for their review of Activision Anthology for the GameBoy Advance, as the compilation of Atari 2600 titles such as Pitfall! and River Raid goes portable, following a previously released PlayStation 2 version. The creators of the compilation "recruited Bradford W. Mott, the creator of the personal computer Stella Atari emulator, to write the underlying code" for the anthology, and, as IGN Pocket points out, "there are also several homebrew 2600 games included in this pack", including Skeleton+ and Climber 5. There's a lengthy thread on the compilation over at AtariAge, and elsewhere, Slate has passionate words to impart about classic games and how "restrictions... inspire creativity", and Yahoo/Reuters has similarly nostalgic musings about the recent retro revival.
Initial reports from the gameboy version of Activision Anthology say it's got a number of obvious bugs, and the colors are kind of off due to the frontlighting / nofrontlighting depending on which Gameboy you have.
That said, the Playstation 2 version absolutely rocks. If it had the score-saving and original badge requirements the GBA version has, it'd be perfect.
This game is pricy at $29.95 MSRP (USD). The Playstation 2 Anthology is only $19.95. Also, the advertising on the box claims that some games like Pitfall 2 and others have never appeared in an anthology before. Many games haven't, but Pitfall 2 is most definitely on the PS2 disc. Bottom line: the reason to buy this must be portability of the Gameboy and/or those home-brew games or you're wasting your money if you're buying another Activision anthology.
I'll be the first to admit that buying Namco Anthology (Pole Position, Ms Pac Man, Galaga, Galaxian) on Gameboy Advance was a repeat purchase that was incredibly worth it ($12.99 at most stores!) for the portability factor. Not to mention it keeps the kids busy.
What I mean is that a lot of the games (not by choice) were easier to look at. Too many of the more recent games have gone "muddy low-contrast black and brown" making things rather hard to see. The worst I would say is Doom for the N-64: all dark brown and black with a few flashes of red and green here and there. Now, while it wasn't realistic, there was no annoying and pointless urge to aim a flashlight at the screen when you played old Atari-2600 "Adventure" or "Breakout"
What you must realize is that Doom is a bad example, being a 10-year-old game with a limited colour pallete caused by it's original platform's limitations at the time of creation. Most of the console versions of Doom were not much more than ports, with little to no enhancements (except, of course, to get them to work with the controllers). The same could be said about Quake, despite having steeper requirements than Doom. Q2 and Q3 had much richer colour palletes than either Doom or Q1. Many other games, even from the same time period, had better diversity in the colours used.
Not all modern games are this way, and the "cel-animation style" trend is a refreshing step toward clarity, and recent "Final Fantasy" games appear to be stepping out of the Dark Ages, achieving leading-edge "realism" without the darkness and fuzziness.
It's all a matter of the style of the game. The dark and dingy look was part of the game's look and feel in most cases, and if you didn't like it, it just meant that you didn't like that game. Even FF games from the same time period as Doom had a brighter look to them, before 'realism' started creeping in on them. Cel shading is just another look made possible by technology, and has just started to be used appropriately within the last year or so.
The Atari 2600 stuff was limited by the system's pallete. Doom and Quake were limited by the number of colours you could display while maintaining real-time play (meaning that even though a computer was capable of displaying more colours than an Atari 2600, you still could only display so many colours on the screen before your framerate went to hell while trying to render 3D images). Current games rarely run into problems with the number of colours displayed on the screen, and Q3 was among the first to actually show the usefulness of fully-realized 32-bit colour. Now, of course, John Carmack is talking about pushing on to 64-bit colour, which currently isn't supported by most hardware, and could offer who knows what kind of accuracy in displayed images.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
That multiplayer thing isn't a fault either I might add, it's just the way they went and I don't see the problem. I've been monitoring the product on a number of forums and I've seen no mention of "bugs", only that some titles may be up to 20% slower than they should be, and that only seems to affect gameplay in one title, H.E.R.O. -- which is reported to be too damn easy, but we'll see.