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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.
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.
Slashdotter c.2002: We are justified in downloading retro games for free because they are not available at market! We should pass the Public Domain Enhancement Act!
Retro games start to be released at very low prices as parts of nice compilations...
Slashdotter c.2004: We need to pass the Public Domain Enhancement Act IMMEDIATELY to stop these tyrants from selling their products! My rationalizations for infringing other people's copyrights are slowly dwindling and my sense of entitlement has grown too strong to rethink my position! I demand everything for free, boohoo.
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
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...