The Arcade for the Playstation 2

The Arcade is a collection of remade games, all of which draw some level of inspiration from the earliest glories of the arcades; the promotional blurb on the box inlay even goes as far as claiming it’ll bring “the retro charm of classic arcade gameplay out of the games cabinets and into your living room”, which is a rather extravagant claim even for the best emulator-powered collection. But The Arcade isn’t another Midway Arcade Treasures or Capcom Classics Collection, not for Liquid Games the chore of getting official licenses to produce clones of the hits of yesteryear, instead they’ve gone down the path of the companies who produced clones.

Each game is based loosely on an original arcade title and, since there are ten in total, here’s a quick rundown of the included delights:

Battling Bats
Yes, it’s Pong for one player against the console or two players and, whilst everything may be presented in 2.5D and the odd power-up thrown into the mix, at the end of the day it’s still a pretty simple variant on the original. Whilst Pong itself was always pretty simple anyway this doesn’t bring anything new or interesting to the court and the second player AI is, as always seems to be the case, not particularly good at its job.

Freakoids
Any collection of this kind wouldn’t be complete (for want of a better word) without a version of the seminal Asteroids and, as the cheap and somewhat nasty title insinuates, Freakoids represents for The Arcade. There isn’t a fat lot to say about it after that to be honest, except what thoroughly breaks things is the almost novice programming mistake in the control scheme; thrusting immediately cancels out all previous forces acting on the ship, meaning that turning and thrusting stops any previous motion and sends the ship off in a new direction.

Joust flying around with a Jetpac

Jetpac Jousting
Take Joust, remove the distinctive bird-straddling characters and replace everything with shiny, generic sci-fi graphics in 2.5D and you’ll have something akin to Jetpac Jousting; sadly, the fun of Joust has been lost during this translation so whilst it does offer a little entertainment value the overall effect is rather short lived.

Moon Mission
Not so much a mission to the moon itself, more a game about landing on the lunar surface. Yes, it’s a clone of Lunar Lander, because that’s a game that everybody thinks of when going through the list of 1970’s and 1980’s games they want to play again…

N-Vaders
Yes, it’s a Space Invaders clone. No it doesn’t pay proper attention to the “rules” of Space Invaders and does all sorts of strange things like having the rows move independently and the bullets that the nasties fire shifting down the screen at hideously fast speeds. And yes again, it’s not much cop to play.

Galaxy Warriors
At last, a title in this package that doesn’t immediately give away its illegitimate heritage! Galaxy Warriors is based on Centipede, except rather than bugs, mushrooms and snails the graphics once more have a shiny science fiction theme… perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it a Gridrunner clone in that case? Anyway, as renditions go it’s not particularly notable apart from some annoying collision detection.

So many choices...

Muncher
Surprisingly, the next little gem isn’t “borrowing” from Namco’s pill-consuming classic either; instead Muncher has a distinct lack of actual munching involved since it’s taking all of its cues from Q-Bert before legging it off down the street with them, giggling like a lunatic.

Protectors
Four bases sit at the corners of the screen, the walls of each guarded by a round “bat” of sorts; the players (a mixture of human and console) must prevent the ball bouncing around from knocking the defenses of their own castle away and exposing it’s interior whilst trying to send it careering into the walls of their opponents. And as with the original Warlords, more fun with more than one player.

Operation T.N.T.
It’s pretty hard not to enjoy a Bomberman clone but this one actually gets enough things wrong to kill even the joy of blowing stuff up! The two major problems are trying to get the player sprite (which for reasons that will probably never be adequately explained appears to resemble a blue squirrel, possibly with a crash helmet) to move around without getting “stuck” at intersections and the way that only a fraction of the play area is visible at any time making it damned hard to see where the attackers are in order to lay explosive-flavoured traps for them. Despite those flaws however, this is the title I spent the most time with of the entire package.

Somebody set up us the bomb!

Pipe Puzzle
A variant on Pipe Mania where tiles containing pieces of track must be laid to keep a robot from falling into oblivion; the shapes are of course selected at random and its up to the player to make the most of whatever they’re given to keep things going as long as possible.

These “retro themed” products always annoy me to be honest, because although they might retain a few of the more general traits of the games they’re almost parodies of and probably have enough in common to “fool” a small percentage of thirty somethings with extremely vague hankerings for “the games they used to play as a kid” who somehow haven’t considered typing the titles of said games into Google and in the process discovering emulation. For anyone with even half an hour of recent exposure it’s a bit like watching Streetfighter straight after seeing Mick and Keith in the flesh (Streetfigher are a Rolling Stones tribute band and yes, I had to look that up because I had no idea what a Stones tribute band would be called… part of me vaguely wanted it to be a pun on Boulder Dash), no matter how familiar it might feel, there’s that nagging feeling that something is missing.

That probably sounds a little like snobbery but it honestly isn’t, in the same way that a significant number of the cloned console and computer games of the 1980’s tended to be poor because they were just knocked out as cynical attempts at cashing in on whatever trend was currently huge without any real care for the games themselves, remade games like those included in The Arcade fail to be anywhere near as entertaining as they could be because they similarly lack the levels of care and attention to detail that were lavished on the originals they’re only loosely imitating; there is some entertainment to be had as it stands and although there are a few bugs the execution isn’t truly hideous, but I’d seriously question the claim of “100s of hours of Classic Gameplay” touted by the box.