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Midway Arcade Treasures 2 Line-up Confirmed
Thanks to GameSpot for its news story confirming the final line-up for multi-platform retro compilation Midway Arcade Treasures 2. According to the piece: "the compilation will feature 21 ports from the venerable publisher's arcade catalog on a single disc, including A.P.B., Arch Rivals, Championship Sprint, Cyberball 2072, Gauntlet 2, Hard Drivin', Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, Mortal Kombat III, NARC, Pit Fighter, Primal Rage, Rampage World Tour, Spy Hunter 2, Steel Talons, STUN Runner, Timber, Total Carnage, Wizard of Wor, Xenophobe, Xybots." The compilation, a follow-up to last year's first Treasures compilation, is "priced at $19.99... [and] is scheduled for a fall 2004 release on the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube."
Of course, what would be super-cool would be if games like Steel Talon and Cyberball 2072 supported either Internet or [Xbox] System Link play. It's obviously not going to happen. It's amazing enough that they're going to be doing high scores on Xbox Live. Adding in actual Internet play would be too costly for games that aren't going to have the huge audience that a fancy newer game would.
Short version: I'm salivating for these Atari...uhhhhh...Midway classics. :D
This list reminds me very strongly of my old Atari Lynx. Now I just need to power my PS2 with a small inadequate battery to get the full experience.
Just when you think the first one had all the classic games you could ever want, this thing comes out of nowhere. I certainly know I'll be enjoying more of Total Carnage and the Mortal Kombats, now quarter free!
This retro gaming crap is paying off! They're re-releasing games popular from my generation!!
Nothing beats good old Mortal Kombat.
The first volume's was horrible. The icons for the games were hieroglyphics and you couldn't tell which game they were for until you moved the cursor to them and waited for a second for the thing to display a title screen where the title would finally be readable.
Does anybody know which company is developing this? According to the article it's "N/A" which isn't terribly helpful.
I agree but the thing I found annoying most of all was the crappy controls that couldn't be redefined... On all the games.
I love Super Sprint but why oh why does the accelerator have to be on R-tigger and steering have to be controlled with the L-stick? Coming from using a PSX for donkeys-years I want to use the D-pad and A. Very poor if you ask me.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
You must've played a different Midway Arcade Treasures.
Not to sound rude or anything, but it's not like they were hard to figure out. A ostrich with a lance could safely be assumed to represent Joust; the little ship from Defender, in all probability, represented Defender. A smashed TV might, just might, be Smash TV. And you'd think the fact that they were in alphabetical order would've pretty much ensured that nobody would have that much problem figuring out which is which, but I guess the folks old enough to remember most of those games no longer have all their mental faculties.
Not to sound rude or anything, but it's not like they were hard to figure out. A ostrich with a lance could safely be assumed to represent Joust; the little ship from Defender, in all probability, represented Defender. A smashed TV might, just might, be Smash TV.
I might be going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing you haven't bought this as a gift for anybody who wasn't familiar with the originals.
And while I can't remember all the icons any more, I don't think all of them were very intuitive (or even that easy to see on a small TV).
Besides: Things have names. Why not show them? It's basic usability.
How would you like it if, the next time you ordered something online, you'd have to pick your state, not from a drop down list, but from a graphic menu showing the shape of each state, arranged alphabetically, without the name?
If you're not developing a hoop-jumping game, don't make your user jump through hoops.
Can't wait to play Total Carnage. Unlike it's predecessor, Smash TV, the super nes port was really terrible (unplayable, imo).
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Hope it is better documented than the first...anyone know how to play gauntlet with any character other than the Warrior?
That's odd, most of the games allow you to change the controls. And I was definitely using the D-pad for "Super Sprint" (which worked surprisingly well, given the way the original arcade game was set up).
To me, the joy of playing Hard Drivin' wasn't the game per se (there were other racing/driving games that were better, if not totally 3D like this one), it was the force-feedback in the steering wheel. Every time I saw a cabinet (preferable a sit-down one) I'd put in my 50c and play the thing. I was 15, a year before I could drive in real life. It was great!
MAME has raised the bar for this kind of work and put the lie to these proprietors who are coming along years after the fact doing what MAME has done in a far more portable fashion. This kind of work is a perfect reason to support The Public Domain Enhancement Act--we already know that the public can and will provide for themselves in this space. We don't need the proprietors to do the archiving and distribution work as we once did.
Digital Citizen
The reason was because the acceleration and steering could be fully realized analog like the arcade game.
-Jon in Canada
This compilation looks much better than the first one. I love Arch Rivals, and of course all of the Mortal Kombat games.
Agreed, about the menu. That was awful.
This is almost certainly being put together by Digital Eclipse, who produces almost all of the emulated arcade games available on consoles these days.
This is actually not as good a collection as the first, because they got all their most classic games (that they had the rights to) out in one go. And it had Rampart, which was worth the purchase price all by itself. (I have to praise Rampart on Slashdot at least once a month or my brain tissue dries up.)
Note that there are still no Atari vector games, even though there are some that may be from the era they could publish. (Major Havoc would have rocked!) Also, no I, Robot.
Here's a little information on the best games in the compilation, from whatever I can remember about it without having to actually do research:
- Cyberball 2072 - (Atari)
A seriously cool arcade football game, played with robots. The "bomb" in the game is actually a bomb! While popular in the day you don't hear much about this anymore. Imagine a modern Madden-like game with robots! Publishers aren't cool enough anymore to try things like that.
- Gauntlet 2 - (Atari)
The star of the compilation, in my opinion. It didn't get as wide a distribution as the original Gauntlet, despite being a better game in almost all ways. Much more varied gameplay. Could use a limited-credit mode.
- Mortal Kombat - (Midway)
The first game in the (in my opinion) overrated fighting series. Fatalities don't seem as impressive these days as they were then, and don't really add much to the gameplay. Reptile was a cool idea, however, a super-secret opponent that could only be found if you got through the first several fights without taking a hit, or something like that.
- Mortal Kombat II - (Midway)
The second game in the series, still considered by many people to be its pinnacle. Fighting games are a portion of arcade history I've never cared much about -- arguably, they ruined arcades for anyone other than teenage boys.
- NARC - (Williams)
A game I've never played, but many people love. Designed, I believe, by Eugine Jarvis, the Robotron guy.
- Rampage World Tour - (Midway)
Good for all the reasons the original Rampage was fun.
- STUN Runner - (Atari)
A primitive polygon racing game, but with a cool design and lots of great ideas. An example: The last level has names floating in the air at different points, indicating how far the best ten players got in playing it!
- Total Carnage - (Williams)
The second-best game in the compilation, this is basically super-deluxe Smash T.V. with much more variety in gameplay, including a password system, scrolling levels and a huge number of secrets. Notable because to get the best ending you had to collect a metric assload of keys AND play through the game AND grab all the clones in the last screen AND grab all the presents in the end-of-game bonus round! I and a friend actually did the first three of these four things, and was really annoyed when we missed one or two things in the bonus round. Curse you Midway!
- Xenophobe - (Midway)
An interesting, if annoying sometimes, game. Supports three players.
- Xybots - (Atari)
An early first-person shooter, though I think it used limited perspectives instead of polygons like Wolf 3D.
and....
- Timber -
This is a game I've never heard of?? I mean, I've even heard of Splat! in the first compilation (mostly because I got curious about an arcade game with the same name as a Commodore game I once created), but I've never heard of Timber. Time to do some Google searching....
Oh, I've not seen anymore mention this, but there were actually some fairly serious flaws in the first compilation, including woefully incomplete access to game settings when complete access would have taken slight effort (that really hurt KLAX), sound flaws in many games (Rampart, Marble Madness, Toobin') and shameful game crashes in Defender II (a.k.a. Stargate).
Also, while they did get S.T.U.N. Runner, STILL NO ARCADE TETRIS!
I don't know who's opinion you're attempting to summarize, but it certainly isn't mine. I look at the Midway Arcade Treasures collection as something the community did for itself long before Midway decided it would be a good idea to release this collection (or any of their other similar collections). We weren't able to get these works for many years and I don't endorse allowing the term of copyright to stay overlong or stop work to reduce it because a handful of these works come onto the market.
All copyrighted works should enter the PD without exception and in far fewer years because copyright is about incentivizing authors and publishers to publish more work not granting a perpetual ability to exclude. By the way, Dover press might differ with you about the ability to sell copies of works in the PD (virtually every publisher worth their salt has a classics line with many PD works). We need to recognize that the new comes from the old and we are losing our ability to deal in our own culture when we allow everlasting copyright (whether outright or on the installment plan). Far too much attention is paid to the proprietors looking for government to relieve them of what US copyright was meant to achieve. Far too little attention is paid to what happens when we endlessly indulge commercial interests. I encourage you to compare Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger in terms of published work--one had to publish to keep the money coming in, the other wrote a hit book and has been coasting on that for decades. The US is very grateful that Twain kept writing (Twain is often referred to as America's best writer), but he wouldn't have kept writing if he had a term of copyright that we do now.
Digital Citizen
They also have fewer titles to work with, have complete source code, and have taken years longer to produce what is probably less portable code. But what's interesting is not these petty technical issues, it's what effect this software has on society. Neither MAME nor Midway's software are free software. You could help make MAME become free software or find a free software emulator and work on that. This way we could have a much improved state of affairs.
Digital Citizen
As far as gameplay goes it's not really anything special, although it may have started the pseudo-3D Final Fight-style side-scroller genre (I'm not really sure). Graphically it's okay; the digitized graphics were a neat novelty for the time but in-game the sprites are too small to really tell. But as heretical as this may sound, NARC is great not because of the gameplay but simply for the style. From the over-the-top War on Drugs theme ("say no or die!") to the character names ("Hit Man" and "Max Force") to the ridiculous enemies (anyone who's ever been to the slums of America's inner cities will of course recognize the knife-throwing killer clowns) to the beyond-brilliant final boss (not going to spoil it for anyone, and words couldn't do it justice anyway) to the background music (the "NARC Rap" at the end is a better completion bonus than any "proper" ending could ever be) to the simple fact that you play a DEA agent with a goddamn rocket launcher, the game just oozes style. MAME unfortunately chokes on this game with my lowly five-year-old PC so you can bet I'll be picking this up on day one. And I may even give some of the other games in the collection a whirl, too...
IIRC, "Spy Hunter" chugged on Midway arcade treasures one (on PS2 anyway) so just because it is official there is no guarantee that your machines CPU will run faster (unless they are ports from source code rather than ROM emulations for example, but that leads to other problems, especially since some games were written in an obscure typeless language before that new-fangled "C" thingy took off).
If they really want to get some sales, they should release Marble Madness II on this compilation... Midway still has the rights to it, I believe. I'm chomping at the bit to finally see *that* game.
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