Williams Arcade Classics

"Warning: This oldies collection is intended for those with nostalgic memories of early 1980 arcades/game consoles. If you don't remember these games from your local pizza shop or were not born when they came out, you may be in for a big disappointment."

Nostalgic Fever Grips Gaming Community

First came Microsoft Arcade followed by the Activision Collections. Now Williams Electronics the pinball and arcade giant is getting in on the act of porting classic video games from the early 80's to the PC platform. William's Arcade Classics ports the arcade classics (and some not so classics) Defender, Defender II, Joust, Bubbles, Robotron, and Sini Star from the cabinet to the PC in a new CD-ROM collection for Windows (the games run in MS-DOS mode).

Now, mind you, these are not updated versions of classic games like the recently released Pitfall Harry or Lode Runner, these are the original games -- 16 colors or less, blocky graphics, limited sound. After spending God knows how much on CPUs, RAM, sound cards, speakers, video cards, joysticks etc so that your machine will run the latest games, why would you want to play outdated video games? Good question.

Why Ask Why?

The recent trend to bring 80's arcade games to the PC scares me. These games were great when that's all we had but after experiencing games like NASCAR and Mechwarrior II are we going to be satisfied moving little blocks of color around the screen? Not likely, but yet...

Its mind boggling to think that the original programmers sometimes had only had up to 64K in which to cram their games. Even in this PC version all six games only take about 4MBs when installed to the hard drive. So why the CD-ROM? Ah, that is the brilliance of this CD-ROM and the reason it has great value to game historians/collectors. The rest of the CD-ROM stores about 232 MBs of video interviews with original designers of the games, original sketches, sales sheets, information and photos of the cabinets.

Video Game Trivia

For its time, Defender's 16 colors were considered cutting edge?
Sini Star's original name was Dark Star?
Hours before Defender was unveiled to thousands of arcade owners and operators at a major coin-op trade show, the programers were still burning ROMs back at the company? The buzz at the show was that Defender and Pac Man would bomb? The average game time during the first week of Sini Star's release was 33 seconds? The bulk of programming for Robotron took four days? An Atari 2600 version of Defender II was released in 1988? There is a bug in Sini Star which makes it possible to receive over 250 lives?

Is This CD-ROM For Me?

Williams Arcade Classics is a hard CD-ROM to review. On one hand it has a great nostalgic value but on the other hand, compared to today's polygon, texture mapped graphics, 32 bit programming and stereo sound effects, 10 plus year old games can't hope to compete. Is it for you? Take the following little test:

Get it if...

• you consider yourself a game collector
• you hang around the "rec.games.video.arcade.collecting" newsgroup
• you fondly remember wasting sunny days in a dark arcade pumping quarters into Robotron.
• you are a game programmer who has forgotten how to put game play above glitz.
• you feel today's games don't give that true non-stop arcade action.
• your wife nixed the idea of buying an old arcade game for the basement.

Don't get it if:

• you were born after 1975.
• your eye to hand co-ordination is shot.
• you are expecting games which will hold you attention over a long period of time.
• and parents, think twice about buying this disk to impress your kids with the great games you played instead of studying for your biology final. Unless, you want your kids laughing at you. "Dad, are you telling me you spent all of your lunch money and spare time playing this? Ha, Ha, Ha".

Review By GamesDomain