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Arcade Treasures 2 is a Keeper

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 12
Date: October 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Just like its predecessor this collection of arcade titles makes you dizzy with nostalgia and gives you 20 immediately playable games to keep you going for hours. The emphasis is on fighting games including : Mortal Kombat 2 & 3, Primal Rage (Dinosaurs fighting), and Pit Fighter. Also included are Gauntlet 2 (4 player D&D style shooter), Spy Hunter 2 (drive and shoot), Xybots, NARC (shooter), APB(drive), Cyberball 2072(futuristic football), Timber(arcade woodsman game), Wizard of Wor (fast paced Bezerk type game), Xenophobe (3 people at once shooter), Arch Rivals (NBA 2 on 2), Rampage World Tour (sequel to the monsters destroy cities), Kozmik Krooz'r (space shooter), Championship Sprint, Hard Drivin, and Wacko (puzzle shooter). It's all worth it just to have Mortal Kombat in its arcade form - insanely fast and hard. The thing you have to remember is these games were meant to eat quarters, so average play time may be 2-3 minutes until you learn all the tricks. But wow are they fun - like having an entire arcade jammed into your Gamecube. Awesome collection at a great price!

Pure Arcade Heaven

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: November 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Hey, I still play the first Arcade Treasures all the time. So I was positively delighted to learn of this incredible new collection.

Arcade Treasures 2 is a true sequel, in a sense, in that most of the games are from the late 80's and early 90's. There are a few exception to this, such as Wizard of Wor and Timber. Anyway, these later games are typically more complex and HARDER than the games on the first collection. This is a good thing, because it will likely take you awhile to master them. Which makes this disc not only a fun-filled blast of nostalgia, but ensures re-playability for quite some time. And that's why I find myself rating Volume 2 higher than the first. Sure, the previous disc arguably has more true "classic" titles. But I think I'll be spending more time with this one.

Favorite games: Mortal Kombat 2 & 3 (now if only I could remember how to do all those fatalities...); NARC (best 2-player co-op action game ever); Wizard of Wor (for the funky early-80's speech synthesis); Total Carnage (truth in advertising...this game could cause a freakin' panic attack); Timber (I admit, I wasn't familiar with this one, but it's really charming and fun).

I only hope other game companies will realize there is still a market out there for retro coin-op games (Nintendo, are you listening?) and give us more TREASURES, please!

The price makes this collection of almost-perfect games even better.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: September 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

THE SHORT: The ridiculously cheap price is worth spending on some of these games on their own, let alone in a double digit package. But while most of the games run great, there are some slight issues here and there that make some of these games not quite arcade-perfect.

THE LONG: I love Mortal Kombat II. Adore it. I always have, and though the SNES version was great in 1994, no console has ever had an accurate version of it. That's why this was an exciting release- it promised arcade accurate versions of this game as well as a bunch of other good ones. And if you're just thinking about getting this now, then you didn't have to go through the debacle of having the original Mortal Kombat removed from the package and thrown onto the more cost-prohibitive MK: Deception.

So I checked out message boards and waited for the game, and once it came out and I chatted with others, I noticed a disturbing trend: no one console had a release of this collection that was entirely flawless. The PS2 supposedly had trouble with, I believe, Hard Drivin', and the Gamecube had sound problems or something. The Xbox version was supposed to be flawed in some way too, but I honestly can't remember what that was supposed to have been. All I know is that I was a devoted MKII fan to notice some fanboyish inaccuracies. I won't go into them all here, and while there aren't a lot they are noticeable: stuff like flickering shadows when a character jumps, and screams that go on past death when a character lands in the Pit, etc.

But for every thing the programmers somehow messed up, there are ten it gets right. MKII, as with all others on the disc except for the somewhat muffled MK3, has sound so crisp I'd forgotten how much better it was than past console offerings. The graphics are sharp and the colors bold, and the animation is fluid and correct to how I recall it. Nothing is left out, not even something that a great deal of players never knew about MKII: The computer fights more lazily and gets worked into patterns more easily when using controller 2. This strange, small trick, as well as others such as Shang Tsung's Sub Zero freeze/ fatality skin glitch, were emulated perfectly.

But that's the thing- there are still disappointments despite these best intentions. In making the game, someone neglected to re-map the start button. In MKII, pressing start was part of two tricks- selecting a random fighter and accessing hidden character Smoke, but since pressing start in this collection brings up the main pause menu, start is rendered obsolete in-game so apparently these details are inaccessible. That's probably the biggest mistake, and while it doesn't make the package suck, it'd definitely worth mentioning.

Otherwise, the collection is pretty fine. Most of these games are well suited to the Xbox or PS2 controller's simple layout (The GC controller is absurd for the fighting games) and more importantly, the rest of the games seem about the same as I remember them in the arcade. Like with me and MKII, it would take a devoted veteran to notice any changed details that aren't egregious. More so than the original Midway Treasures, this disc has some great titles- 90's classics such as Narc, Primal Rage, Total Carnage, and of course MKII and 3 are on a disc that by this point costs less than twenty bucks. At that price, imperfections and all, it's hard to pass up on such a modern collection of proven greats.

Good trip down memory lane -great if you like fighting games

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: October 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I'm not a big fan of fighting games, but there are some classics on here like Mortal Kombat 2 & 3.

The games that make it for me are Timber, Cyberball, Hard Drivin', and Wizard Of Wor. I'd pay $20 just for those 3... ;-)

The disc has 20 games, so for a buck a game you can't go wrong.

Midway Arcade Treasures is a pot of gold!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

After having bought Midway Arcade Treasures 1, when volume 2 was released, I drove to my favoritevideo game store and bought it. It's great fun playing Mortal Kombat 2-3, Total Carnage, Arch Rivals, and the rest are awesome reproductions doneon the Cube. You'd be crazy not to buy this collection of games for $20.00. Playing this game on rainy days is pure ecstasy, you'll go back in time when Arcades were all the rage. I suggest youdrive to your nearest video game store or buy it online at Amazon.com right now!

MMM the good ol' days of extremely violent digital fun.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 14, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Mortal Kombat 2 and 3!! Narc!! These games are exactly the way they were in the arcade. I remember cutting class to play these games in the arcade. It is still fun to play MK 2 with yer ol' high school buddies, taking the time to learn all those fatalities and combos. I remember I use to waste hours of the day playing these games and find them still fun to play every once in a while. Biggest problem I had was working the Primal Rage game. I don't know if I had a defective copy or if it just was too much memory for the gamecube to handle. NOTE: It is mostly a nostalgic value to myself and may not be as fun for the new genration gamers.

Great for those who remember, otherwise...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

While I grew up during the period in which these games were originally released, I'll admit I never frequented the arcades enough to play most of them in their prime. So like more casual players, I grabbed this disc purely on the brand recognition of the titles I knew: the Mortal Kombats, Rampage, and Primal Rage. Luckily, those four held up quite well, even though they're technically not arcade perfect.

The others are more hit-and-miss. Some feature familiar gameplay elements that later made it into more well-known titles: Arch Rivals is basically NBA Jam without the NBA license, and Total Carnage, Championship Sprint, and Cyberball will feel familiar to most players. Some like NARC and Pit-Fighter will make you understand why video games were never taken seriously for the longest time, and Spy Hunter II, APB, and others are a lesson in coin-munching addiction while not offering much for extended periods of play.

If you like the Mortal Kombat games (and Midway certainly knows they are the main draw for the release), pick this up. The bonus footage and promos also make this a nice, collected archive. The rest of the games range from slightly to severely dated depending on your tastes, but offer a good history lesson of what the old school arcade scene was like.

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