Where the first Atari Collection was easily
the best example yet of a Retro Revival collection, Atari Collection 2
falls flat. There's almost no bonus material - for which there is plenty
of room when you're dealing with a bunch of games which barely average 50K each
on a CD-ROM which can hold 750 megs of data.
(Midway [developed by Digital Eclipse], 1998)
It could also be that the games featured on The Atari Collection 2 are
from the mid 1980s, a time when the new games appearing on the scene were
shifting toward more elaborate graphics, but less engaging play mechanics. This
is exemplified by the marvelous 3-D vistas of Crystal Castles and
Marble Madness - two games which are notoriously hard to control, whether
with their original arcade trakballs, or with the Playstation's joypad
controllers.
If anything sells Atari Collection 2, it's probably the presence of
the genre-defining early arcade "role playing"-style game
Gauntlet. I never spent much time on the arcade version of
Gauntlet, as by the time the game originally appeared, I was also getting
out of the role playing game phase of my adolescence. But this collection's
port of Gauntlet is a good one, and even provides for a full-on,
four-person game (with the addition of the Playstation 4-player tap).
Rating:
Three quarters - worth repeat play, but with some annoying features that
might alienate less patient arcade veterans.
Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster
Games emulated (links lead to reviews of the original games):
Three quarters - worth repeat play, but with some annoying features that
might alienate less patient arcade veterans.
