Once again, though, if you want to show off your 30 years of refined Defender muscle memory, you will be extremely hindered by the control scheme. Leaderboards are a major draw for Midway Arcade Origins, and one of the only reasons to play the games in this context. Smash T.V., Robotron 2084, and Rampage work very well with a console controller, and since all of these games were recently removed from the XBLA Marketplace (and were never in the PlayStation Store), this is the only place to play them with online leaderboards. Some of the more popular games make out better. Today's analog sticks and face buttons simply can't be expected to keep up with the demands of this evolutionary period of gaming's many brilliant (and wacky) ideas. You can emulate the sights and sounds, but when you remove the joystick, the steering wheel or the trackball - not to mention the massive, art-slathered machine - you can too easily lose a game's soul.įaced with this hurdle, Midway Arcade Origins makes some pretty strange choices for the collection: Marble Madness and Rampart originally employed a rolling trackball Vindicators had bizarre tank levers Spy Hunter, Super Off Road, and others had actual steering wheels, pedals, and gear shifts in their original incarnations. Contemporary consoles or computers don't do a very good job at recreating the experience of playing an arcade machine, tactually speaking. Unfortunately, this collection makes many of the same (somewhat unavoidable) mistakes that emulators and re-releases of yore have. You would think, then, that I would be enamored with a collection of golden age classics like the 30 contained in Midway Arcade Origins. I now have 12 large 1980s arcade machines in my modest San Francisco flat, from BurgerTime to Star Wars. It wasn't until I began writing about and researching game history that it occurred to me that it would be awesome to have a refrigerator-sized video game in my living room.
It's not nostalgia my earliest gaming memories begin with the NES generation.
I don't remember much about the golden age of arcades, but I am utterly obsessed with games from that era.