his double CD-ROM package, which bundles Atari Arcade Hits 1 and Atari Arcade Hits 2, brings 12 coin-op arcade classics to the PC and offers a quick trip down memory lane to the time when video games were simplistic yet utterly addictive. Greatest Hits is also a game buff's heaven, complete with video interview clips, moldy-oldies archives and frivolous desktop themes.
The retro pack includes landmark games like Asteroids and its superior sequel, Asteroids Deluxe, a top-down space shooter with an unrelenting mandate to destroy rocks. Armed with only a nimble spacecraft, a single, limited-ammo gun and a finite amount of shielding, Asteroids Deluxe offers faultless, Han Solo School of Flying gameplay.
Gravitar features a planetary skimmer that must scoop up fuel cells with a tractor beam while avoiding and destroying enemy turrets. The presence
of gravity adds an extra challenge. Han Solo never had it so hard.
There's also raw twitch play in Centipede and Millipede, and there's the stalwart, low-resolution, high-anxiety Missile Command--the counterstrike, fixed-base, firefight festival.
The pack includes the original Battlezone in all its unsophisticated glory: the eerie, immersive, planet-hopping, seek-and-destroy tank game that has since been updated (twice) and reincarnated as the quintessential sci-fi battle simulation. This crude forerunner contains the very basis of the franchise's popularity: raw disquiet on the otherworldly front.
And finally, there is yet another landmark classic in Tempest, a game so unique in concept that it has never been copied, let alone bested. As a foreground-to-horizon tubular shooter, Tempest was originally played with a heavy-duty paddle wheel which spun without restraint, allowing for spectacular around-the-tube frenzies. Unfortunately, that joy is lost in the PC version for the simple lack of appropriate hardware, which turns out to be a common glitch for all the games.
Controllers wanted
Sadly, Tempest is a non-event without its custom paddle wheel. Likewise the other paddle games--Pong (good grief), Super Breakout and Warlords--all suffer. Unless the player actually owns a PC paddle, the experience is less satisfying than it could be.
These games are playable, to be sure, and the inferior experience is really no big deal considering the caliber of most paddle games in the first place.
More importantly, games that originally utilized a trackball lack their original potency. In spite of the fact that trackball peripherals are on the market, none of them reproduce the heft and weight of the original coin-op controller orbs. On the upside, a mouse does a fair job of emulating the task. A mouse, after all, is essentially a small, inverted trackball. That said, a mouse is notably slower and is unable to carry the impetus or the sustained spin of the real McCoy. But having said that, Centipede, Millipede, Missile Command and Crystal Castles all play very well with a high-speed, precision mouse such as the Razer Boomslang 2000.
Battlezone, like Tempest, originally came with a custom-designed, dual-joystick configuration for controlling forward and back motion of tank treads, yet that controller was simply digital, as in go-stop/on-off, so a suitably configured keyboard handles the task nicely, as does a joystick, for that matter.
Asteroids Deluxe and Gravitar both originally used a simple five-button spread to control fire, thrust, rotation and shield/tractor beam. The keyboard can be configured to emulate the original splay almost exactly. Since it is these two games that offer the best of the best of retro gaming, it's all good.
Controller issue aside, this is one of the finest retro compilations available--a must-have for at least two of the 12 games, all the others being a bonus. It's nice to see the original Battlezone in its rudimentary glory. The same applies to Tempest for the simple fact that it will probably never be cloned or replaced.
