Better then console Midway Treasures 2 but that is not saying much at all....SADLY.
While some fan-favorite games are missing, the overall selection of games is excellent. You've got classics, such as Defender, Joust, and Gauntlet; quirky games, like Marble Madness, Klax, Rampart, and Toobin'; and arcade favorites, such as Paperboy, Rampage, Spy Hunter, and the first three Mortal Kombat games. Personally, I wish Smash TV had been included, and I'm sure some retro-fanatics will bemoan the absence of Robotron 2084 or Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Nonetheless, 21 games is 21 games and that's value no matter how you do the math.
What almost kills this collection is how little care and effort Midway and developer Digital Eclipse put into it. They literally just slapped 21 games onto a disc and organized them around a silly snow globe menu. High scores are saved at least. Some games are stretched graphically to fill the PSP screen, some are rotated vertically, and some are in their original aspect ratio with black bars on the sides. Quizzically, players don't get to pick their preferred display options. From the looks of things, absolutely no time was spent working out kinks such as graphical glitches, audio pitch problems, or load times--because almost every game on the disc suffers from one or more of those problems.
Instead of writing up the rest of this review the normal way, I'm just going to organize my notes and let them speak for themselves. Sure, that's the lazy way to do it, but Midway took the easy out with this disc and I figure I should be able to do the same thing reviewing it. "Garbage in, garbage out," as they say.
How did your favorite game fare?
* Arch Rivals: Basketball game, precursor to NBA Jam. Stretched graphics look fine. Speech snippets are nice, sound effects and music are tinny.
* Championship Sprint: Top-view racing game. Used to have wheel and pedals in arcade. Directional pad and gas button work okay. Eight tracks to pick from. Stretched graphics look blurry. Engines and crashes sound staticky.
* Cyberball 2072: Identical to arcade game. Simple futuristic football game with robots. Ball explodes if you miss a 4th down. Graphics are unadulterated since arcade game used two monitors side-by-side. Music and digitized voices are mostly good.
* Defender: One of the first side-scrolling space shooters ever made. Arcade perfect. Love the wireframe graphics and synthesized sound effects. Graphics are stretched to fit screen but look fine.
* Gauntlet: Bizarre combination of dungeon crawler and puzzle game. Graphics slightly stretched but OK. Too much motion blur. Excellent announcer voices ("Warrior shot the food"), music seems fine but is too quiet. 4-player mode is crazy good.
* Joust: Nothing like jousting on a flying ostrich. Graphics are slightly stretched and filtered but not obviously distorted. Arcade perfect graphics and audio.
* Klax: Tile-dropping puzzle game. Very addictive and not a Tetris ripoff. Darn near arcade perfect. Graphics are stretched but only text is distorted. Sound effects and female announcer voice are crystal clear.
* Marble Madness: Precursor to Super Monkey Ball. Guide marble through obstacle course into the exit. Diagonals are impossible, even with analog nub. Controls are also often unresponsive. Stretched graphics are godawful ugly. Music and sound effects are crisp. Maze layouts identical to original arcade and PC games. Black marble FTW!
* Mortal Kombat: Fighting game made popular due to its ultra-violent "fatality" moves. Arcade perfect. No load times. Original display ratio means black bars on sides of screen. No graphical or audio problems.
* Mortal Komabat II: Graphics are almost arcade perfect. Chamber in the clouds is missing the moving clouds in the background. Original display aspect ratio means black border around screen area. Load times of a few seconds at character select screen and between each match. Brief load time right before fatalities. Audio seems high-pitched compared to original arcade game.
* Mortal Kombat 3: Why not Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3? It had more available characters! Nicer backgrounds than MK2 at least. Original display aspect ratio means black border around screen. Animation in some backgrounds is choppy. Load times same as in MK2. Audio too high-pitched. Game speed is "too fast," like someone sat on the turbo button.
* Paperboy: Deliver papers to customers and trash non-customer property. Directional pad controls take time to adjust to. Stretched graphics look fine. Music and voice effects are a little staticky but audible.
* Rampage: Help giant monsters trash buildings and eat people. Controls are fine. Stupid that players have to choose characters from options menu. Graphics are stretched but it's the filtering that makes the small soldiers and tiny bullets impossible to see. The bass has been sucked out of the audio, such that explosions and giant landings no longer cause percussive rumblings.
* Rampart: Unique puzzle-combat game. Launch cannonballs at enemy ships and castles during attack phase, rebuild castle Tetris style during build phase. Controls are slow to respond in Tetris phase. Graphics are slightly stretched but not obnoxious, and playing field is large. Audio is simplistic but clear. 3-player WiFi could be great fun.
* Sinistar: Asteroids-like shooter with nicer, color graphics. Original graphical aspect ratio, so there are black bars on the side of screen. Graphics are clear, audio is crisp, and voice effects are a nice touch. Simple, but fun.
* Spy Hunter: Race to the finish line and destroy enemy cars with machine guns, missiles, and oil slicks. Great fun. Graphics are stretched to fill screen, but it doesn't hurt one bit. Audio is arcade authentic, which means Peter Gunn theme music and loads of tic-tic bullets.
* Toobin': Race an opponent down the river, in an inner-tube. Watch out for rocks. Throw can at the opponent. Vertical display means you have to play holding PSP sideways. Graphics and audio are authentic to arcade, but the framerate seems sluggish. Music was always lame. Voice snippets are nice touch.
* Wizard of Wor: Bizarre, but fun maze combat game from 1980. Shoot enemy soldiers and monsters. Simple 4-color visuals. Even simpler "pkyoo, pkyoo" sound effects. Graphics are stretched to fill screen but look fine.
* Xenophobe: Side-scrolling action game where you move from room to room shooting aliens. Odd controls make you jump, crouch, grab things, and throw explosives using two buttons that don't always perform the same actions. Shoot button is always "shoot" though. That's the way it was in the arcade, but PSP button layout adds another level of confusion. Graphics are stretched, but not so much that it's obvious. Audio is tinny. Screen is split into three layers so you can see what other players are doing in WiFi play. Oddly, screen is always split like that, even in solo games.
* Xybots: Early first-person shooter from late 1980's. Move through mazes and shoot robots. Simple flat-shaded maze graphics and blocky sprite-based characters. May not look pretty, but it's fun. Can view two-players on same screen in WiFi play. Sound effects are ear-piercing.
* 720-degrees: Skateboarding game. Graphics are colorful. Music and sound effects are ear-shattering. Every aspect of the controls is unresponsive. Diagonals don't seem to work, even with the analog nub. That's bad, since everything is at an angle.
To sum up:
Best - Arch Rivals, Cyberball 2072, Defender, Joust, Klax, Mortal Kombat, Sinistar, Spy Hunter, Wizard of Wor, Xybots.
Decent - Gauntlet, Mortal Kombat II, Paperboy, Rampart, Toobin', Xenophobe.
Not so good - Championship Sprint, Marble Madness, Mortal Kombat 3, Rampage, 720-degrees.