Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits

Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits brought a collection of classic arcade cabinets from Williams and Midway to the Game Boy Color in 2000, prepared for the handheld by studio Digital Eclipse, which specialised in faithful remakes of old games. The collection includes titles such as Defender, Joust and Robotron 2084 - games standing at the roots of the action shooter genre - each bringing its own distinctive approach to movement, firing and defending against hordes of enemies. The compilation thus works as an overview of just how many different ways a superficially similar premise could be handled back at the turn of the seventies and eighties - defending a space against an advancing wave of enemies.

Defender puts the player in the cockpit of a spaceship defending people on a planet's surface from abductors, Joust offers surreal duels atop winged ostriches, and Robotron 2084 became famous for requiring the player to control movement and firing independently using two different input directions, handled on the GBC by a combination of the d-pad and buttons. It's exactly this variety that makes the collection an interesting survey of the early history of arcade shooters, from a time when the genre's rules weren't yet fixed and every title tried a different approach to movement and firing.

The graphics were adapted for a colour display but retain the stark, geometric character of eighties cabinets. The GBC collection was appreciated mainly by players with a fondness for gaming history, since it offered several iconic titles in one package for the price of a single game. Today, Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits works as a compact pocket museum of the early arcade shooter era and a good introduction for anyone wanting to get to know the genre's roots without having to hunt down original cabinets. Given the differing difficulty and style of the individual games, every player will also find at least one title that suits them better than the rest.