Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play Hands-On

This November, Midway plans to release a collection of 21 of its old arcade hits in one package for the PSP. Given Midway's long and storied history as one of the great North American arcade game manufacturers, there are some definite gems set to be included, and with the inclusion of local wireless play in 16 of the 21 games, this collection could be very cool.

We were shown an early version of the collection at a Midway event in Chicago, and so far, things look pretty good. The PSP screen allows for the same level of crisp, sharp display that arcade games are known for, so games like Mortal Kombat II really pop off the screen and look much cleaner here than they have on TV screens in previous Midway collections. However, the games are currently in need of some optimization, as many of them are moving pretty slowly. That's a fairly common trait among compilation packages while they're still in development, so it's reasonable to assume that most, if not all, of the 21 games will be running at full speed when the collection releases later this year.

Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat 3 will join MK2, though strangely there's no support for Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Given that UMK3 was a superior game to MK3 and, in arcades, ran on functionally identical hardware, this seems like a pretty disappointing exclusion. Can the PSP simply not handle the power of characters like Ermac and Human Smoke? What of Classic Sub-Zero? Alas, we may never know the answer. Beyond the MK games, you can also expect to see Spy Hunter, Sinistar (which should work well with the PSP's analog stick), Defender, Paperboy, and 720 on the single-player side of things. As for Wi-Fi-enabled games, the collection is scheduled to deliver Klax, Joust, Marble Madness, Toobin', Rampage, Gauntlet, Rampart, Wizard of Wor, Xybots, Championship Sprint, Arch Rivals, Cyberball 2072, Xenophobe, and the three Mortal Kombat games.

That's a good number of games. Provided the package comes together as planned, this should be a pretty hot portable compilation for fans of Midway's back catalog. Expect to see more on this game as it becomes available.