| paleface [sys=GC; cat=Action_Variety; reg=NA] |
| | | Reference added: 555
"Midway's rehashes on various consoles."
Midway again ports their old arcade games to console, this time packing in most of the games found on the Dreamcast "Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits" volume 1 (see entry 555) and volume 2, although with the curious omission of Moon Patrol, plus a lot more, a total of 24 games in all.
Standouts for me (that weren't on the DC compilations) include Marble Madness, Super Sprint, RoadBlasters, Toobin', Vindicators, Root Beer Tapper (the original Tapper is rolling over in its grave!), and the big kahuna, Smash TV. All appear to be faithful ports, except in cases like Toobin' where a vertical display has to be shrunk down a bit to fit (there's no rotated screen option), and then in Vindicators I couldn't seem to get my turret to rotate with the shoulder buttons, but probably I was doing something wrong. Oh, also in Vindicators they set it up so that you move with the two sticks, but shoot with A, and you can't really do that unless you have three arms. Fortunately you can use the D-pad to steer instead.
If I'd thought about it I probably would have got the PS2 version, since I tend to like the DualShock's twin analog sticks better than the GC's analog+C-stick combo, and you use such controls for Robotron 2084 and Smash TV, two super games, not to mention for Toobin' and Vindicators as well, but having played with it a bit the analog+C works pretty well for Robotron and Smash TV, since with the sticks being slightly different I don't get the move and shoot actions confused as much as I tend to with the DualShock. Still, it isn't as good for Toobin' and Vindicators, since in those you need to be able to move the sticks exactly equally in order to steer.
You can't configure controls in any of the games, which is a real letdown, especially since you could do so in the DC releases--in fact there are no game options available at all. Blah! They try to make up for this with video interviews, art galleries, trivia and so forth for a selection of the games, but you won't care about those at all after you've browsed them once (and you really needn't care about them before that, even). Like the DC versions, the menu system is kind of fudgey, but it gets the job done, and also like the DC versions the game does not support progressive scan, which is lame.
Still, Smash TV and two-stick Robotron are worth the price of the compilation, in my view, and of course if you don't have the DC versions then you'll be happy to get Joust, Spy Hunter, Defender, etc. Oh, I suppose I should just list the games and get it over with:
Spy Hunter
Defender
Defender II
Gauntlet
Joust
Joust 2
Paperboy
Rampage
Robotron 2084
Smash TV
Bubbles
RoadBlasters
Blaster
Rampart
Sinistar
Super Sprint
Marble Madness
720
Toobin'
KLAX
SPLAT!
Satan's Hollow
Vindicators
Root Beet Tapper
Appropriate games have multiplayer support (three-player for Rampart and Super Sprint, for instance, among others) but I haven't tried any of those yet. |
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