Midway Arcade Treasures 2

When the original Midway Arcade Treasures came out in 2003, it was a great way to play 24 old school arcade games like Smash TV, Joust, and Gauntlet all over again on any of the current big consoles. What wasn't there to love? The game even scored a high 8.5 for the Playstation2 version (John Scalzo) and an impressive 8.1 for the GameCube (Kyle Williams) here at Gaming Target. Sadly, when I reviewed the package, I only gave the Xbox version of Midway Arcade Treasures a lower 7.0 score. It's not because the Xbox version was inferior to the Playstation2 and GameCube editions, but I still felt cheated that most of the arcade games on the compilation were already originally on other Midway collections. Even the bonus DVD content was nothing too new. Maybe some of you thought I was a bit hard on it for that reason, but I hate when games have recycled material, yet they expect us to fork over more cash. Fortunately, since the first Arcade Treasures did well, Midway is giving us more of their arcade legends and some of these games are new to compilations.

Here are the games already announced for the new Midway Arcade Treasures 2:

A.P.B.
Arch Rivals
Championship Sprint
Cyberball 2072
Gauntlet II
Hard Drivin'
Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat II
Mortal Kombat 3
Narc
Pit Fighter
Primal Rage
Rampage World Tour
Spy Hunter 2
Steel Talons
STUN Runner
Timber
Total Carnage
Wizards of Wor
Xenophone
Xybots

Perhaps the greatest part about these 19 titles is that most of them are more recent than the games found on the previous collection. A lot of these arcade games were made during the 1990's, so you don't have to feel quite as guilty now if you remember some of these, uh? Many of the games like Steel Talons and Hard Drivin' even have polygon graphics so you can see some 3D visuals: retro style. Personally, I would love to play those games again just to compare them to today's stuff.

We can't forget about those three Mortal Kombat games either, eh? All three games of the mega hit series feature real digitized actors, unparalleled quick fighting action, and if you learn the games well enough, you can dismember your enemy with a gruesome fatality. It wasn't too long ago when hundreds of thousands of gamers would gladly pay 50-60 bucks just to play watered-down, (and some times censored) versions of these one on one games on older 16-bit systems like the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. It should be cool to see the first three games finally come to the Xbox, especially since many fans still consider Mortal Kombat II to be the best in the series.