[#] Midway Arcade Treasures (Midway, PlayStation 2, 2003)

Run, coward!

As an arcade-loving small child with very few opportunities to actually play arcade machines, these kinds of comps were my best friend, and Midway Arcade Treasures is as strong as they come. This rounds up all the heavy hitter golden age arcade games from Williams, Midway, and Atari through pitch-perfect emulation. Robotron: 2084 (and sequel Blaster), Defender (and sequel), Joust (and sequel), Smash TV, Tapper (root beer, not Budweiser), KLAX, Rampage, Gauntlet, Spy Hunter, Marble Madness, Paperboy, the list goes on...

These games were noted for their rock-hard difficulty and technological innovations, from unique control schemes to primitive 3D to speech synthesis. Whether or not each game is any fun is, of course, going to be up to your tolerance for those things (or your tolerance for the driving games inexplicably using the right analog stick for acceleration), but at the very least, the classic Williams set of Robotron, Defender, and Joust are hard to argue with. Each game is customizable in controls, number of lives, difficulty, and number of players, so if you've got three in-person friends and a multitap (lucky), yes, four-player Gauntlet is here for all of you.

This game actually outdoes Namco (remember, the originators of the arcade compilation) by including not just a much larger variety of games, but also...a museum! Yes, while they're not amazing quality visually, and not every game has the same breadth of content, there are actual developer interviews on video, written histories, production art, and sell sheets for each game, things Namco stopped including in their comps by the 2000s. As such, Midway Arcade Treasures isn't just great to play, it's also a neat look into arcade history—provided you can tolerable the use of Comic Sans for all the menus. (Why?)