Visit a shrine to the greatest hits of Williams
Electronics' spectacularly successful arcade manufacturing venture of the early
80s. Spawned almost solely by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, Williams' arcade
division spawned some of the most memorable hits of the golden age of video
games - and these are just a few of them.
(Williams/Midway [developed by Digital Eclipse], 1995)
One of the earliest classic arcade emulation collections for the Playstation,
The Williams Collection was Williams Electronics' answer to Namco's
series of Namco Museum games, chronicling the
greatest arcade hits of one of Williams' biggest rivals in the early 80s. And
for my money, The Williams Collection is better - no cheesy,
unintelligibly bit-mapped photos of motherboards here, kids; Williams brings you
full-length video interviews with Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, the game
designers/programmers behind such hits as
Defender and
Robotron: 2084, as well as the
minds behind such other games as Joust and Bubbles. But most
people don't buy Playstation games for video interviews - they buy them for the
games themselves, and I can assure you that these emulations pass with flying
colors. My only regret is that The Williams Collection pre-dates Sony's
analog joysticks, which would be great for Sinistar and Bubbles.
Controller complaints aside, however, this collection includes the best-ever
emulation of Robotron, finally returned to its full glory thanks to the
dual directional keypads on the Playstation's controllers! Even with nice 3-D
graphics, Robotron X doesn't hold a candle to the original.
The wealth of supplemental material, and the outstanding emulations, really
demonstrated what such titles as Namco Museum and the second collection
of Atari titles under the Arcade's Greatest Hits umbrella could have been
- perhaps even should have been.
Rating:
One dollar - trade it in for more quarters, you'll want to play this one
again.
Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster
Games emulated (links lead to reviews of the original games):
One dollar - trade it in for more quarters, you'll want to play this one
again.
