Midway Arcade Treasures for the Xbox

For those of us who remember when the arcades were still in nappies, the list of games on Midway Arcade Treasures will ring quite a few fairly loud bells. Whilst some of these titles are more curiosities than big names (for example Splat or the close-to-unreleased Blaster) there are a lot of highs in this collection and several names present that influenced not only their generation but the future of gaming in general; seminal titles like Defender, Tapper, Spyhunter, Robotron: 2084 and Stargate that date back to the gaming stone age are joined by titles from later generations such as Marble Madness, Smash TV and Super Sprint. And those with very good memories will by this point have realised as well that the “Midway” part of the title is somewhat misleading because, although most of the games are indeed treasures, not all of them are by Midway or indeed Williams, a few of the stand out titles were instead created by the coin-op division of Atari.

The presentation is nicely done; a slightly long-winded but thankfully skippable intro sequence involving a temple leads to a wall of hieroglyphs representing each of the twenty four titles present which can be selected by the controller. Although being as close as any emulation can get, there are of course differences; cabinets such as Marble Madness with its trackball and 720 or Paperboy with their custom controllers have been modified to use the Xbox pad’s analogue stick. Robotron: 2084 and Smash TV both fare well for the controller, player movement has been assigned to the left analogue stick and the firing operated from the right, replicating the dual joystick controls of the original arcade cabinets.

Midway Arcade Treasures - playing Robotron: 2084

One surprise was the modification of both Defender and Stargate to allow players to either use thrust and turn controls as the original coin-op offers or simply press left and right on the D pad or stick to thrust in the appropriate direction. Despite a reasonable reputation amongst friends as a shoot ‘em up player, I’ve never been much good at Defender personally and, since I came to it after the likes of Scramble and Vanguard, have always assumed that it was the controls I couldn’t get used to; in fact it was that in part, the rest was that Defender just really enjoyed handing my arse to me! Each game is presented with a selection of extras, the types of content available varies between titles but some have footage of interviews with the creators such as Eugene “Defender” Jarvis and John “Joust” Newcomer whilst others have what the box inlay refers to as “top secret documents”… in other words scanned marketing pamphlets, the original design doodles and similar media.

Midway Arcade Treasures - playing Defender

The trivia can be quite interesting in some cases and a couple of the games have a small quiz where the answers are presented by the creators themselves in video form. The quality of the footage throughout isn’t constant and mostly rough around the edges, whilst the sound is almost uniformly poor, but if you’re into your gaming history in the rather geeky way that I might be [ahem] or if you enjoy the “making of” documentaries on DVDs it’s fascinating listening to explanations as to why Klax has no music, the origins of Robotron: 2084‘s claustrophobic design or the reasoning behind Super Sprint only allowing players to control three of the its four cars. The package as a whole does suffer a little from “information overload” and there’s too much to take in during a single sitting (and some gamers probably won’t even notice) but, like the games themselves, the extra content can be dipped into when the mood takes.

The version of Midway Arcade Treasures played here was for the Xbox – it’s also available for the Gamecube, Playstation 2 and Windows PC.