PlanetDreamcast | Games | Reviews | Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Volume 1

Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Volume 1 Page 2/2 Blast ('em ups) from the past - Review By Fragmaster Stargate is pretty much just Defender with a couple of little additions, like that square wormhole thing. Joust - Hooray for ostrich ridin'! In Joust, you mount an ostrich (errr...) and do battle with evil, vulture-riding knights. The goal is to hop from platform to platform, jousting your enemies off their birds and collecting the eggs they leave behind before they "hatch" and respawn, all while avoiding the dreaded pterodactyl and the ghastly lava trolls. Joust really shines in two-player mode, and it's still one of the best combination cooperative / deathmatch games you can play. Joust plays just as well on the Dreamcast, no complaints here! Be sure to grab a friend and joust his freaking head off after you've had some time to practice up a little bit solo. Options include fiddling with the number of lives per game, changing the bonus life score, and altering the difficulty level. You can also play Joust's yellow edition (which contains the infamous "pterodactyl cheat." Bubbles - I have to admit I'd never played Bubbles before playing through this collection, and I'm sure the same holds true for the majority of you guys reading this. It's definitely the least "worthy" game in this collection. Anyways, it's a pretty simple game in which you, as a soap bubble, need to slide around the sink collecting crumbs, insects, and other junk while avoiding big spiders, razor blades, and brush type things. There's not much to it. You can kill spiders by picking up the miniature cleaning lady (?) and hitting it with her broom, and if your bubble is big enough to have a face (you get bigger as you collect more crap), you can push brushes aside with your mass or warp through the drain into the next sink. Uhhh... yeah. It's not a "classic" in the truest sense of the word; it's just a mediocre old game. The control, sound, and graphics are good, and you can adjust the number of lives per game, bonus life score, and difficulty level. The Bad My eggs! MY EGGS!!! While it's cool that Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Volume 1 has six faithful translations of some good old-school games, the overall package is a bit lacking. First off, there's absolutely no history information on any of these games, besides the brief descriptions of the games in the manual. There's all kinds of cool little extras Midway could have packed into the disk: interviews with the original creators, pictures, all-time high scores, trivia... but no. The manual is also surprisingly skimpy, containing little information for those unfamiliar with the games. The interface is similarly poor, as it's very plain and uninteresting. Yeah, it's easy to navigate and that's really what matters most, but they could have done better than plain text. And you know those annoying animated developer / publisher logos that play before the beginning of most DC games? Greatest Arcade Hits has those too, but for some reason you can't skip past them. It takes about twenty-five seconds before you can actually choose a game. Although most games contain all of the options contained in the original versions, there's not much beyond that. Some additional options (such as speed control perhaps?) would have been a nice addition. Bubbles really sinks! Get it? There's also a load / save feature, but I'm a little confused as to what it actually does. As far as I can tell, it doesn't save your game (meaning you can't save your Robotron game when you've got five lives and 500,000 points), it just saves your scores. But the manual doesn't clearly explain this (it just says you can "save your progress") and since you can access load / save at any time, even in the middle of the game, it's a bit confusing. Finally, it's worth mentioning that if you can read this, you can already play all of these games online for free over at Shockwave.com (or through emulators). If you only have a passing interest in reviving your gaming past, maybe this'll be enough to satisfy your retro desires. The Final Word Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Volume 1 is a decent collection of four great classic games and two so-so ones, but the lack of extras and the various minor annoyances prevent me from recommending it outright. If you remember these games from their glory days and can't wait to play them again, then by all means pick up this collection. Otherwise, give the online versions a whirl to determine whether or not you want to pump one-hundred and sixty quarters into this sucker. Developer: Digital Eclipse Publisher: Midway Genre: Classic Highs: Some great games, accurate gameplay, cheaper than the real thing. Lows: No history content or other extras, plain presentation, not enough options. Other: 1-2 Players, VMU Compatible (saves require 5 blocks). Media: Gameplay 1 (MPEG) - Robotron: the single most-played arcade game at GSI, though you wouldn't know it from watching this video. [Big (10.8M)] - [Med (9.8M)] - [Small (2.1M)] Gameplay 2 (MPEG) - Frags and William try to cooperate in Joust. [Big (12.6M)] - [Med (6.8M)] - [Small (1.6M)] Gameplay 3 (MPEG) - Bubbles, the ugly duckling of the group. It's pretty lackluster, even if the original cabinet was made of cool blue plastic. [Big (13M)] - [Med (7M)] - [Small (1.5M)] Final Score: (out of a possible 10) Visit this Game's Dreamcast Database Entry Previous Reviews Comments on this review? Mail Feedback.