Hands-OnMidway Arcade Treasures

Midway recently showed a work-in-progress version of Midway Arcade Treasures at its annual press event. The version was pretty early, only showing off about half of the games scheduled to be in the collection. But those games appear to be emulated properly.

The version shown running on both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox showed off some of Midway's older games scheduled to appear on the pack. So games like Defender, Stargate (called Defender II here), Bubbles, Sinistar, Robotron: 2084, Moon Patrol, Joust, and more were present. All the games seem to control quite well. Robotron: 2084 makes use of both analog sticks, or, if you want to play with precision, you can use the D pad and face buttons to control the action. Defender and Stargate take some liberties with the original games' controls, ditching the arcade game's complex thrust- and reverse- button setup in favor of a system that lets you handle all of your movement with the D pad. The arcade version of Sinistar used a 49-way joystick, and the home versions emulated here make proper use of the analog joystick to duplicate the original game's wide range of motion.

Graphically, the game matches the arcade originals just fine. The real challenge will be getting the games that weren't shown--games like 720 and Toobin'--to control properly on your standard PS2, Xbox, or GameCube controller. The final version of the game will also contain the same sort of "DVD extra"-style content that most of Midway's releases contain, including interviews with Eugene Jarvis and other designers, some of the original artwork and sales sheets made for the games, and more. Midway Arcade Treasures is scheduled to be released later this year.