Midway Arcade Treasures 2 for Xbox Reviews & Ratings by IGN

Last year's release of Midway Arcade Treasures was an incredible hit for the publisher, so much so that the company has offered up a much meatier sequel with Midway Arcade Treasures 2. The pack for 2004 follows up the original's theme of combining nearly two dozen original, classic arcade titles of the 80s and packing them with historical data and developer interviews on a single console disc. The sequel, however, ups the ante with a beefed-up collection of much more contemporary arcade hits, more detailed data on each game, and a much better interface in which to play them. The overall package still isn't quite as over-the-top awesome as, say, a Special Edition DVD flick, but you'd be nuts if you don't see the value Midway's put into this compilation.

The original collection released this time last year featured more than 20 arcade games within the Williams and Atari Games library, but stayed firmly in the "golden age" of arcade gaming. Most of the titles were more of the "quick shot, instant gratification" designs that were created for single quarter experiences. For Midway Arcade Treasures 2, the selection is far more generous. The compilation still has a few quirky old games from the early days of videogaming, but many titles are actually way more ambitious games that have a ton more value since players will be more likely to play them for longer than the "quick shots" of the Joust/Defender games from the original Midway Arcade Treasures.

First of all, it's a solid and impressive line-up that covers many different videogame genres. For racing game fanatics, you've got Hard Drivin', one of the first "real life" driving simulations; A.P.B, a game that throws in some unique cop action with the driving skills; and Championship Sprint, the two player sequel to the three player Super Sprint included in the original Treasures. There's also some violent blastfests in the form of NARC, a brilliantly tough side-scroller that's inspiring a remake next year; and Total Carnage, a much more sadistic, topical, and downright tough "sequel" to Smash T.V., a game that's a part of last year's package.

Sports fans have two choices: a futuristic football classic that possibly inspired the original Genesis Madden series: Cyberball 2072, and the precursor to NBA Jam: Arch Rivals. Space game fans have a batch of titles: Xenophobe's a great three player co-op title inspired by Aliens, Xybots is a neat precursor to Doom, and Kosmik Kruiser and Wacko, two different games featuring the same character, offer Robotron 2084-style gameplay in a different package. And then you've got the tough to classify category, at least for the lazy (like me): Gauntlet II, Timber, Rampage: World Tour , Wizard of Wor, and Spy Hunter 2, games that have their own unique charms.

But it's the fighting fans that will really get the most out of Midway Arcade Treasures 2. Four top-notch fighters of the 90s have been included in perfect arcade emulation: Primal Rage, Pit-Fighter, Mortal Kombat 2 and Mortal Kombat 3. Pit-Fighter is definitely a game that requires a forgiving taste, but you can at least appreciate the direction designers took with the idea; it was one of the few games that featured photographed "actors" for all of the roles in this fighter, beating Mortal Kombat to the punch by a couple of years. Primal Rage can't come close what people would consider a "classic" one-on-one fighting game, but it's got violence and it's got gigantic lumbering dinosaurs...so it's not all that bad. Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3 are the real, contemporary reasons to buy this pack; even though it's cool to hate the series, you just can't deny that the games did have some cool gameplay in their fighting designs. And Midway Arcade Treasures 2 easily offers the best home conversions these two games have ever seen. It's a little awkward to have MK2 and MK3 without MK1 to tie the series together, so if you want the original you'll need to pick up a copy of Mortal Kombat: Deception.

Last year's compilation pack had a number of "bad" games in the bunch. While Midway Arcade Treasures 2 keeps the ratio of hits and duds weighed more towards the "hits" side of the fence, there are some games that you'll probably only play once or twice and simply move on to the rest. Wizard of Wor is more in here for historical and "filler" purposes -- the game wasn't all that great to begin with, but it had its place in arcades regardless. Kosmik Kruiser and Wacko are the most obscure games in the bunch, and only the lucky few who actually remember seeing these games in arcades will play them for longer than a couple of minutes.

A handful of the games still have the arcade-to-home transition problems that will always plague compilation packs. Championship Sprint and APB, for example, just isn't nearly as fun with an analog stick as they are with the weighted wheel that players must whip around to turn the vehicle. Gauntlet II still has that pesky problem of giving players unlimited health because the "quarter drop" is offered as a button push; this problem has been addressed, though, since players can turn off the button in the options menu. Overall, though, the standard system controller does a fine job of simulating the controls offered in the original arcade cabinet.

Once again, these arcade games are brought back to life through the magic of emulation. These are not ports; the programmers actually trick the console hardware into thinking they're the original arcade system. It's nowhere near a new technique, and in fact, with the increasing power of the consoles it's possible to pull off emulations that previous gaming systems just didn't have the horsepower to pull off. Digital Eclipse has had a lot of experience in this field, and it shows as Midway Arcade Treasures is a solid batch of games that run accurately on systems that were never meant to run the games in the first place. The graphics are handled a bit better than the sounds, and the games that required the more powerful hardware, like MK2 and MK3 fall a little short with more muffled audio than what the original system could pull off.

As good as the emulation, it's definitely not perfect. Whether it's from programming goof, lack of development time, or simply not enough horsepower in the system, there are some quirks in the emulation that keep the games from being 100% accurate to the original title. You'll notice little things mysteriously vanishing shadows in MK2 and MK3 for example.

The only real problems in the XBOX version come in the form of Hard Drivin's inconsistent framerate. During the Phantom Photon challenge and instant replays, the game actually gets a little faster and a lot smoother than the arcade version. As great as the game looks in its smoother motion, the developers should have simply stuck with one framerate throughout the entire game experience. Aside from Hard Drivin', the Xbox version runs into the same strange problem as last year's Midway Arcade Treasures: it doesn't matter which controller port you use, it will always default to the first controller button pressed as "Controller One." You'll notice that solo players can't play as anyone but George the Gorilla in Rampage: World Tour, for example, due to this programming glitch.

The original Midway Arcade Treasure's awkward front-end has been tossed in favor of a much cooler, cleaner interface that makes it much easier to find the game you want to play. Each title in the menu system is accommodated by a short video clip (or a still screen on the GameCube) of the game in action, as well as historical text in a secondary menu. All titles have a custom control menu where players can create their own control scheme that fits their play techniques, as well as view or reset the high scores outside of the actual game.

Some titles have video interviews with the original developers, but this footage is absolutely the pits no matter what system you're playing it on; these videos were clearly filmed years ago for past Midway compilations, and the footage itself has worse sound problems than a basement cable access show. It's great that this archive is here, but it's obvious that it's just recycled stuff. For the next compilation, hopefully Midway can assign a bit more of a budget to the historical part of the package. How about a "where are they now" featurette for the actors in MK and Pitfighter?

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