Retro Gaming 101 part 2 "Modern Consoles"

Game compilations are nothing new especially those that bundle up a few old games into a new package. Usually this was something you would see for early games release in the life of a particular system or ports to the PC. Recently retro game packages hit, bundling old arcade perfect ports to home game systems. This has created a renaissance for retro gaming. Below is a guide to some of the modern titles.

Personally I feel Midway arcade treasures is the best package to come out to date, with Midway arcade treasures 2 a strong second. They offer around 20 old school games for about 20 dollars; which I see as an amazing deal. The games range from early 80's to mid 90's which allows for a fun trip down memory lane. By these NOW!!!

For old school console games I would look at Intellivsion lives and the Atari Anthology. These offer TONS of games for a bargain price. Intellivision even includes histories and documentaries; a first rate product for game historians. Atari offers both arcade and cartridge ports for a total of 85 games. Finally Playstation owners can also grab the activision anthology of atari 2600 games, this package looks to offer all the activision and some of the imagic games. There is actually a PC version with more Imagic and some homebrew games.

Nintendo and Genesis era gamers will enjoy the Sonic Mega plus and Megaman anniversary collections. These offer a histories of the venerable game lines that equal hours of play. My fellow Xbox owners can look for the Megaman game in March. Konami has gone a unusual route and offered a collection of 5 nes ports only to the PC. I hope we will be seeing something like this hit the consoles soon but it will need to include a few more games to be of significant value.

Finally I am left with Namco Museum. Good I hate this thing, it shows up everywhere, it is the grand father of console retro gaming. It has few games and all from the early years of arcades. It just isn't worth the money unless you see it cheap. I could recommend it if they had included just two more games. Of not for Playstation owners, this was something of a line on the PS 1 and there were something like six versions. With a little digging and maybe some eBay you could grab the PS1 versions of the games.


Game Xbox PS2 Game cube
---- ---- --- ---------
Midway 1 Yes yes yes
Midway 2 Yes yes yes
Intellivsion Yes Yes Yes
Atari Yes Yes No
Activision No Yes No
Sonic Yes Yes Yes
Megaman Mar 05 Yes Yes


Next I will take a look at some of the costs and pains of tracking down old school consoles. Also I will take a look at emulators, Jamma and Ultracade.
;