I can’t begin to tell you the joy that I felt when I first saw Williams Arcade Classics on the store shelf. As an avid arcade junkie of the 70’s and 80’s, I had played all six of the games that are included in the package: Sinistar, Defender, Defender 2, Joust , Bubbles, and Robotron. In my high school and college days I had become quite good at Defender 2 and Joust, and now I could not wait to be able to play these games, endlessly, for the simple price of just one CD.
There is no telling how many thousands of quarters I had dropped into how many hundreds of machines across the length and breadth of my home town!
Thankfully the game loaded easily, and the interface was easy and creative, giving you the “feel” of walking into an arcade room and choosing a machine rather than just selecting a game off of a list. To my complete satisfaction, each and every game exactly replicated, down to the last pixel, the very images that I had enjoyed so much as a teenager. The starships, the mutants, the enemies, the bubble, the cockroach, the robots, the family members, the ostriches and their riders, even the Sinistar himself were recreated exactly as I remembered them. The sound
effects were every bit as accurate as the as the visuals. Every “boink”, “boom”, “bang” along with the flap of the ostrich wings to the explosion of a space cruiser was as accurate as the sounds that I remember from the original arcade games. I was taken back in time when all of my friends and I would gather around a machine to compete in two player games, or cheer each other on as we set about trying to battle for a the high score.
An added thrill was that you could play “arcade manager” and set the controls for each individual game. It was up to you, for example, to decide how many lives you had each game, or how much you had to score to get a bonus game.
The only draw back to the game was the fact that you had to play the game from the keyboard. Where I used to be able to generate high scores on Defender 2 with the original buttons and joystick, I could not quite get used to playing the same game using directional arrows off the keyboard. (Remember, I am an old guy! Maybe with more agile fingers, you could do better!) Joust, with its relative simplicity, was the easiest game to master in this new format.
