Midway's Greatest
Arcade Hits
for the Nintendo GameBoy Advanced

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Have you ever heard the expression “If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all?”

Despite the fact that I have nothing nice to say, I am still going to review Midway’s Greatest Arcade Hits (MGAH) for the GameBoy Advanced.

Anyone who has read my reviews on this web site should know that I have a different type of reviewing style.  Unlike many other online gaming sites, I tend to stay away from the “this sucks, that sucks” type of review.  I like to praise what is positive.  Despite the fact that I do mention all of the negatives, I like to say what is wrong, and how it could have been done better or improved.  I can’t do that for this review, because frankly, so much of this collection is wrong, that I wouldn’t know where to start.  MGAH is certainly the single worst title available for the GameBoy Advanced, and is quite possibly the worst classic arcade compilation available for any gaming console or computer.

Let’s take a look at the four games that are included in this collection:

Defender -- A Eugene Jarvis classic.  Set in the future, your planet is under attack by swarms of alien forces.  Their mission is to kidnap the humanoids from the planet surface, and convert them into deadly mutants.  Your job is to fly your spaceship along the planet surface and eliminate the alien threat, and save the humanoids.

Robotron: 2084 – Another game from Eugene Jarvis.  In the future, humanity has been nearly wiped out by the Robotrons.  Your mission is to defend the last family on earth.

Joust – A fantasy game that puts you in a molten lava arena on the back of a flying ostrich.  Your character is the good knight.  Your mission is to fly around the arena and eliminate the forces of evil.  The evil knights also fly on the back of an ostrich.  Use your lance to do battle with the evil knights by knocking them off of the giant flying birds.

Sinistar – Possibly one of the scariest videogames ever created.  The gameplay itself wasn’t scary, but the voice of your main enemy will certainly make you react while you are playing.  Pilot your spaceship around an asteroid field collecting minerals.  The minerals are used to make Sinibombs, the only weapon that will destroy the evil Sinistar that constantly follows you.

So what we have here are four classic coin-op games.  Each one of these games has a place in videogame history.  So how come they couldn’t be properly ported to the GBA?

Well, the answer is simple.  In my opinion, Midway hasn’t done much lately that has been right.  In another silly move, that again is just my opinion, they used the wrong studio to create this collection.  In the past, Midway, and many other companies releasing classic compilations, have retained the services of Digital Eclipse, and they have done some OUTSTANDING work.  Digital Eclipse is the group responsible for such titles as Atari Anniversary Edition, and previous Midway’s Greatest Hits collections for the PC, Sega Genesis, and Sega Dreamcast just to name a few.  However, for this collection, Midway used the talents (and I use this term loosely) of a little-known British group called Pocket Studios.

Let’s get down to some specifics.  Defender, for example, is full of problems.  The largest issue in this game is a serious problem with collision detection.  When I am flying around, the Lander ships constantly shoot at me; just like they would on the original coin-op.  However, on the GBA, there is some strange stuff going on.  Sometimes, Landers will shoot at me, and miss me entirely, yet I explode in a ball of fireworks.  Sometimes, a shot from a Lander will sail right through my ship, and nothing happens.

Also in Defender, there are some major issues with speed.  The enemy ships move around much faster than the arcade version.  This makes an already difficult game impossible to play.

Next, let’s look at Robotron: 2084.  By nature, this is a tough game to put on any console or handheld system, as the original Robotron coin-op utilized two joysticks:  One for moving, and one for shooting.  It is pretty obvious that this control scheme won’t work on the GBA.  So, your joypad is used for moving.  Pushing the “A” button shoots in the direction you are moving.  Holding down the “B” button while pushing the “A” button will make your on-screen character stop moving, and he can now shoot in any direction.  While this is an interesting control scheme, it severely alters gameplay.

Robotron also suffers from some of the same speed & collision detection problems as Defender.

Sinistar suffers from a completely different set of issues.  The original coin-op used a 49-direction optical joystick, so your movement was very precise.  When this game came to the Sega Dreamcast last year, the Analog controller did a great job of recreating the original controls.  So, how do you do that on the GBA?  Well, you don’t.  So, you end up using the GBA 8-way joypad.  While the game is still playable, you will notice a major difference in control sensitivity while playing.

The next problem is the display itself.  The upper portion of the screen is your status window.  This window shows your score, your inventory of Sinibombs, and your radar.  This window takes up entirely too much real estate on the GBA screen, and you are left with a very small area for playing the game.  Like the controls in Robotron, this problem seriously affects your ability to play the game.

One issue I noticed about Sinistar that really bothers me has to do with mining the minerals from the asteroids.  If you aren’t quick about picking up the minerals after you mine them, they have a tendency to just vanish from the screen.  The original coin-op did not do this, so I’m not sure why this happens on the GBA.

Finally, we move on to Joust.  Joust is one of my all time favorite games, and it kills me to see it butchered the way it has been for this collection.  Pocket Studios has managed to put together a game that they should be embarrassed of.  I have seen better shareware knockoff games based on Joust.

So what is wrong?  Well, like the other games, there are some major collision detection problems.  There were times that I landed directly ON TOP of an enemy knight, which should have killed him, yet I’m the one who died.  Other collision detection problems include the fact that you never actually make contact with an enemy knight.  You will fly right up to him, and before you make contact, you bounce off and continue flying along.  It is like there is an invisible shield protecting you from actually making contact.

Sounds are way off.  The sounds of this game just don’t sound like it’s arcade counterpart.

In the original coin-op, when you kill a knight, the ostrich drops an egg that falls and eventually lands on a platform.  In the coin-op game, the eggs can bounce when they hit a platform, and sometimes, they roll off into the molten lava.  In this game, the eggs fall to the ground like a ton of bricks, and they don’t bounce or roll when they hit something solid.

If your knight/ostrich is walking on a platform, and walks off the edge, the ostrich will continue walking several steps INTO THIN AIR before finally falling off and dropping towards the ground.  (See the screen capture below to illustrate my point.  The ostrich is just standing in open air!)  This effect is completely hilarious.  If you have ever seen a Road Runner cartoon when Wile E. Coyote walks off the edge of a mountain and hangs in the air for several seconds before he starts to fall, then you have a good idea of what will happen in Joust.  It is VERY easy to make your knight stand in thin air.

One of the most fun aspects of the Joust coin-op was the ability to play cooperatively with a second player.  While the two-player options have been removed from all of the games in this collection, I think it was wrong to remove it from Joust.  It would be very easy to do two-player games via a link cable, but sadly, that will never happen.

And here is the major problem with this game.  Sometimes, the enemy knights will FIGHT EACH OTHER DESPITE THE FACT THEY ARE ON THE SAME TEAM!!  On many occasions, groups of two knights would just keep slamming into each other over and over.  In the original coin-op game, if enemy knights would run into each other, they would just reverse direction and continue to look for you.  In this game, they start battling each other.  Is this a collision detection problem?  Is this an artificial intelligence problem?  Is this a sprite problem?  Is it just a simple bug in the programming?  I don’t know, but I can’t believe no one caught this before the game was published.  It sure takes the fun out of the game when the knights you are supposed to be battling are too busy beating the hell out of each other instead of hunting you down.

Do you get the feeling that this collection is going to get a horrible rating?

Conclusion:

Although I do not know this for fact, but my guess is that Pocket Studios didn’t do much in the way of research on any of these games before they started coding.  To make matters worse, they certainly didn’t look at the games after they were completed and compare them with their arcade predecessors.  Anyone who has ever plopped a quarter in any of the original coin-op machines could look at what Pocket Studios produced, and know that these games need to go back to the drawing board.

And who is the "empty suit" at Midway that looked at the completed product and actually said “This is good.  Let’s ship it.”  That person should be handed their walking papers.

All four of these games have serious issues that affect gameplay.  Let’s face facts:  The reason that the games of the late 70’s/early 80’s were so good is that the creators of the games emphasized elements of gameplay because flashy graphics and sounds weren’t possible due to the technological limits of the era.  Changing elements of gameplay, whether intentional or not, kills these games.  The problems with gameplay in this package make the collection (as a whole) utterly worthless.  You will not get an arcade experience from any of these games despite the fact that the GBA is a perfect platform for classic arcade titles.

I could not find ONE reason to spend the money on this collection.  As a result, MGAH has been given the lowest rating of any product I have ever reviewed.  I can safely say that I will be much more careful about spending my money on anything with the name “Pocket Studios” on it.  

For more information, visit the Midway web site

SPECIAL NOTE:  Normally, taking screen captures isn't a problem for me.  I own special screen capture software for PC games, and I have an Asus GeForce2 GTS card with video in/out that works great for console games.  The GBA, and most other handheld systems create a problem, as they do not have video output to my capture card.  Since I do not have a GBA development system, I had to use some unorthodox methods to get the screen captures used in this review.

The screen captures were taken using the TV De Advance mod, which is available in the US from Upstate Games.   This modification allows you to hook up your GameBoy Advanced to any TV/monitor that will accept composite or S-Video input.  In short, if you hate the crappy GBA screen, you can play your GBA games on a TV instead.  In my case, I hooked up the modded GameBoy to my Asus video card, and used my PC to take the screen captures.

The video quality on the screen is quite good.  My initial attempts at taking screen captures turned out pretty bad, but once I managed to tweak some settings on my video card, it worked well.

Special thanks to my good friend Paul Bistoff of Dungeon Games for loaning me his modded GBA.