Anyone who played those games originally knows that most of those are bonafide classics.  Splat! was never actually released, but is a decent game (although certainly not on the level of most others included here). The ones that aren’t all have some redeeming qualities…in their original form at least.  A few of these games just don’t translate well to the PS2, due to the differences in controllers.  I never played Marble Madness in the arcade, but it’s simply too hard to control on PS2.  I’m assuming it was much better with the original trackballs, given everything I’ve heard about the game.  The worst is Rampart, which I loved in its original form but is very hard to control with the PS2 controller.  A big part of that game is rebuilding the castle after each round of battle, but this is timed and it’s difficult to place each Tetris-like piece exactly where it should go.  The result is that the player will often lose because they run out of time and don’t get their castle rebuilt, even if normally it’d be easy to do.  On the whole though, the PS2 controller does an admirable job with most of these games.

So the games are awesome, but almost as important when repackaging old games is the presentation.  This is where this package falters.  The game selection screen uses a cryptic Egyptian-style tablet with icons to represent each game arranged in alphabetical order, making it hard to tell which game is which at first glance.  When an icon is highlighted an intro video is played in the middle of the tablet, but these often don’t show the game’s name clearly or wait a few seconds to do so.  On top of that, the Egyptian motif is simply ugly and clashes with everything else.

The extras are mostly rehashes of those already found in past Midway compilations, and seem thrown on the disk haphazardly.  They’re all found in the History section, but the menu used to navigate them is clunky and interviews are heavily compressed and low quality.  Worse, almost none of the interviews provide more information than the guy’s name.  They aren’t dated, they don’t tell what the person being interviewed worked on, and they don’t provide any other information that would be good to know.  I’m fairly knowledgeable about the history of the industry, but I had trouble understanding why I should care about some of the people interviewed.  Other forms of extras include Trivia, Gallery, and general History information.  Like the interviews, these are only included for some games and not others with no way to tell which without actually going to the menu.  Those sections could’ve at least been grayed out or something if there was none available for that game.

Obviously sounds and graphics are totally dependent on the game being played, but in each case they’re emulated almost perfectly.  The framerate stutters a bit in a couple newer games, but it’s always playable and stable enough.  The only real problem with this game graphically is the ugly interface Midway decided to wrap it up in.

HIGHS:

LOWS:

• The interface is horrible.
• The extras are mostly recycled, bare bones offerings.
• The controls for a few games suffer on the PS2's controller.

Overall Score: 8.0

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