Midway Arcade Treasures 3

Back in the day of the arcade and the 2D systems, Midway was a very big and powerful company. With huge names like Mortal Kombat and San Francisco Rush, it seemed like they would be one of the major players in video games, period. Unfortunately, time has not been gracious to Midway, and it now simply amuses itself with continuing dead series and attempting to remind everyone of their old series that were actually worth playing. And that's pretty much a good prefix to explain their latest compilation title, Midway Arcade Treasures 3.

The third time around in their Arcade Treasures series, Midway has decided to go with what could essentially be called a themed setup- in this case, all 3D racing games. Headed up by the insanely popular San Francisco Rush 2049, Midway Arcade Treasures 3 features games like Hydro Thunder, Badlands, and even the extremely old and dead S.T.U.N. Racer.

Of course, if you've ever been in an arcade, you've probably seen one of the games on here, namely San Francisco Rush 2049. These by all counts were popular games in their time- graphically alluring, easy to pick up and play, and generally enjoyable games to waste fifty cents on. But, the question with these games, and basically all compilations like this, is if they are worth picking up again on a new console just for the nostalgia of being able to play them on your TV set. And, to sum up this whole review in one word: No.




First off, let me touch on the games themselves. I never was truly a fan of these games, and I still cannot find the intrigue in games like San Francisco Rush. Midway seems to always cut back on what makes games deep and enjoyable, and even these little coin-op gems really display that quite well. Take, for example, San Francisco Rush, which seems to be remarkably shallow, even compared to lower tech games like F-Zero for the SNES. Granted that these are Arcade games, but the whole lack of anything to do in these games beyond run around praying to god you get in first (and sometimes shooting, depending on the game) sometimes makes them feel a bit shallow. But, I'm not going to take this into consideration for the overall score, primarily because many people would disagree with me, and this review has nothing to do with the games themselves, primarily the way they are ported.

And, on the note of how they were ported, half of me wants to say “Well”, and half of me wants to say “The worst porting job ever”. First off, the version I played (The XBOX version) had some of the most floaty controls I had ever experienced, especially in the case of San Francisco Rush. Either you overcompensated by touching the pad (Like in S.T.U.N. Racer) or you didn't even turn and ended up having to turn using the emergency brake (San Francisco Rush 2049), the controls were never as spot on as I had hoped. Having played some of these games in the arcades a long time ago, I still remember them never being this horribly hard to control, which leads us to a stunning conclusion: It's a bad port.

This conclusion is also supported by the fact that these games sometimes have graphical issues, which is absolutely positively unacceptable. These games take as long to load as many conventional XBOX games (Strike 1), and sometimes I could visually see errors that were new to the XBOX versions (Strike 2), and I was really somewhat disappointed that I did not even see a single effort to upgrade the 3D graphics on the 3D games, just to add some sort of bonus to purchasing the game (Strike 3). Sure, this is a classics collection, but I doubt any gamer would have anything wrong with Midway going and just cleaning up the textures or SOMETHING new- because that kind of incentive would change my perspective on this package entirely. Because there is nothing but some ROMs and Emulators on this disc (And I know this for a fact, I took the disc and looked at the files on it on my PC), I was left with a very bad taste in my mouth when it game to this package.




One last gripe about this game, though it seems inconsequential, is the choice of controls for some of the games. Obviously, the XBOX controller is not an arcade setup, so it has to emulate it somewhat poorly anyway- but the choice for “Accelerate” to be the trigger button actually somewhat irritated me, to say the least. I know they did it to emulate a pedal on an arcade machine, but, to be honest, it just felt odd to me. And, as I mentioned above, this is coupled with rather floaty/touchy controls, so nothing seems to be happy in your hands.

However, there are some pluses to this game, primarily in the nostalgia department- but not anywhere else. If you are a mega fan of the Midway games of yesteryear, then this is a game I would pick up, just to enjoy the fun games (See: San Francisco Rush 2049, my favorite on this collection) and the throwback to the old days when we wore FEAR t-shirts, drank soda, wore hats backwards, and played arcade games with a stack of quarters. The only issue, though, is the fact that for the same amount of money to purchase this collection could easily get you a Capcom Classics collection, which would ultimately be worth your time more, and be much more entertaining. Hell, I would even recommend getting Midway Arcade Treasures 1 or 2 before this- which is somewhat of a disappointment. In any case, if you're looking for nostalgia, go ahead and get this game- but for anyone else, your money could be put toward much better games.

2.5 star(s) out of 5

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