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GameCube Review - 'Midway Arcade Treasures 3'

by Alicia on Dec. 24, 2005 @ 12:00 a.m. PST

Midway Arcade Treasures 3 is a collection of eight classic arcade racing games featuring insane jumps and stunts in RUSH: The Rock and RUSH 2049 along with jet boat adventures in Hydro Thunder. Test your arena-style 4x4 driving skills in Super Off Road or get down in the dirt with Off Road Thunder: Mud, Sweat and Gears. Experience stunt driving in Race Drivin’ or jump to the future for the post-nuclear battle of Badlands or shoot things up in S.T.U.N. Runner.

Genre: Arcade Racing
Publisher: Midway
Developer: Digital Eclipse
Release Date: September 27, 2005

Buy 'MIDWAY ARCADE TREASURES 3': Xbox | GameCube | PlayStation 2

We're all familiar with the Midway Arcade Treasures gimmick by now, right? Midway takes a bunch of their old arcade games and puts perfect – or near-perfect – ports of a big bundle of games on a single disc. Sometimes they're really great bursts of nostalgia or pick-up-and-play goodness; sometimes they just make you feel grateful for how much better video games have gotten since the "good old days." The latest batch takes a look at Midway's racing arcade games, whose importance fans often forget. To this day, if you happen to find a functioning arcade in suburban America, chances are it'll be at least 50% racing titles. In fact, it might have some of the games included on this very disc.

The earliest title on the disc is 1984's Badlands, an Atari top-down racer that builds on the Super Sprint formula by adding guns. The guns don't do a whole lot, but they're fun to annoy friends with in multiplayer mode, and I'm sure the sci-fi setting seemed enormously refreshing after going through so many Sprint incarnations. The game didn't survive the port very well; although the graphics are arcade perfect, the controls are a little bit too responsive. The analog stick lets you take corners so sharply that AI opponents don't stand even half a chance against a remotely competent human player. It makes a decent party game with two other players, but there's no real reason to spend much time playing Badlands when Super Off-Road is on the same disc.

1989's Super Off-Road is perhaps the king of the top-down racing genre, and the last major hit the genre managed to produce. Developed by Leland, a long-gone coin-op publisher, the original arcade version of the game was called Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off-Road, as if anyone who played the game actually cared who Ironman Ivan Stewart was. The real draw of this game was the four-player action and the twisty, bumpy courses that sent your little car flying around corners. You won a bout by finishing with the most money, which you could then spend on upgrading your car for the next round. The upgrades didn't change performance a whole lot, but it was still terribly fun to try and take down the guy who kept winning with a standard car - or to beat down all comers with your ridiculously enhanced car. The port does justice to what made the game so fun, with full support for four player action. While the analog stick makes it much easier to control your cars in the port, it's also very easy to end up spinning yourself around or slamming yourself into a wall with a too-sharp turn, and this preserves some element of challenge while enhancing the multiplayer fun. Midway was also courteous enough to include the Track Pak, an "expansion" for the arcade game that offered new tracks to drive on. If you've got enough buddies to play it with and a powerful nostalgia for the arcade version, this port of Super Off-Road almost makes Midway Arcade Treasures 3 a worthy purchase by itself.

1989 wasn't entirely a banner year for racing games, though. While Super Off-Road was ruling Wal-Mart lobbies across the nation, Atari was trying to impress arcade-goers with incredibly futuristic vector graphics in STUN Runner, a game that served as a sort of unofficial sequel to the vastly superior Roadblasters. The basic gameplay was identical to Roadblasters: you drove around, shooting at opposing cars while trying to grab enough speed-ups to keep time to race on your meter. STUN Runner took place in a sort of generic Mad Max future, though, where racing pipes inexplicably run through space. STUN Runner is not a game without its admirers, although the vector graphics are brutally ugly to the modern eye. The port does the game no justice at all, though. While the 2D top-down racers got impossibly accurate controls after the conversion, STUN Runner's controls are hopelessly sluggish and unmanageable. For all intents and purposes this port is unplayable and to be avoided.

Another early effort at taking graphics beyond 2D shows up in 1990's Race Drivin', the expanded version of the hit arcade game Hard Drivin'. Historically, it's a very important title that represents the first sim-style racing arcade game, and the first use of 3D graphics in a racing game. Starting up a race even involved turning an "ignition" key and shifting into gear. Still, 3D graphics as a gimmick aren't too impressive these days, and otherwise Race Drivin' doesn't have a whole lot to offer. It also suffers from a port that mangled the controls much the way STUN Runner's did, making them unresponsive and sluggish. While Race Drivin' isn't quite so badly unplayable as STUN Runner, it's still not worth spending much time with.

Chronologically the next title that shows up in the compilation is San Francisco Rush: The Rock Alcatraz Edition. This is basically the classic San Francisco Rush racer with expanded content from the original N64 home version added back in for the arcade. Rush represented one of the first arcade efforts to set a racing game in a recreation of a particular city, and 3D graphics that were amazingly detailed for the time. Unfortunately, like the other gimmick-games on the disc, it just doesn't stand up to the test of the time very well. Rush has been outdone by countless home racers after it, particularly when it comes to car physics. It's also one of the ports where the controls got mangled badly in the conversion, so the cars are much harder to steer at high speeds than they should be. It's not quite unplayable, but given how limited the game itself is, you'll probably not want to waste much time fooling with it. There's a far more interesting Rush game on this disc.

Rush 2049 still carefully replicates the roads of San Francisco, but twists the formula by having the game take place in 2049. Now your cars can sprout wings to glide long distances after launching off a hill, or can pick up weapons in demolition derby-style Battle Modes. There's the basic Race mode offered, along with a Stunt Mode that lets you play around with your cars' wings. You have a wide variety of cars with unique characteristics to play with, and can customize your cars with everything from different chassis to flashier rims. In Race mode you have to pick up Coins on the racetracks to get money for upgrades, while other modes let you immediately sort through the options to build up the car of your dreams. With so much to do, Rush 2049 offers depth comparable to what you'd find in any modern racing game, and graphics nearly as slick. It's probably the most challenging game on the disc, owing to a nasty AI and tracks that demand perfect driving skill, but a hardcore fan would find it a joy to master. If you've got three hardcore friends to race against you, then you can enjoy it even more. The port seems mostly faithful to the controls of the original, but the cornering on the cars seems a little sluggish. Fortunately, it's not hard to adapt to, but could pose a problem to drivers playing on highest difficulty levels.

Another fantastic title from 1999 represented on this disc is Midway's Hydro Thunder, a playful boat-racing game that is far more Mario Kart than sim at heart. The controls are simple, as are the tracks, and there's only three different kinds of boats to choose from. It's an excellent pick up game, particularly for two players, with slightly dated but still attractive graphics and awesome BGM. The port is excellent, with responsive controls, so you're free to enjoy the imaginatively designed tracks and focus on sharpening your skills up enough to unlock the Medium and Hard tracks. While the game is nostalgic, since Hydro Thunder was a machine in practically every arcade, it doesn't rely on nostalgia to be enjoyable. Virtually anyone could pick this up and have an enjoyable, if whimsical, race game experience. If anything, Hydro Thunder is a game that's over too soon, as it doesn't offer a huge amount of tracks to unlock and isn't particularly fun in multiplayer mode.

If you want a Thunder game that offers a bit more complexity, then 2000's Offroad Thunder rounds out the collection. The controls are basically identical to Hydro Thunder's, and it uses the same rules for using nitro to boost. However, the mud-covered off-road racing tracks demand a lot more skill from a player who wants to win regularly, and overall the courses are harder to begin with. There are also more types of cars to drive with and more challenging tracks, where you have fewer options for eliminating opponents outright. The kitschy redneck design sense for the game (as well as the muddy brown tracks) make the graphics and music quite a bit less appealing than Hydro Thunder's bright colors and lively electronica, but the fact that it offers so much more challenge and a "career mode" is likely to give it more replay value. It's a solid racer that could go head-to-head with all but the very best modern offerings in the genre.

Scoring this game is hard, because while the excellent ports are truly excellent, there are also some hideous clunkers in the mix. All told, it results in a game that's worth it if you're interested in playing specific titles included on the disc - particularly Super Off-Road, Hydro Thunder, Offroad Thunder, and Rush 2049. If you aren't particularly interested in any of these games, then you can safely give this volume a pass. Racing games are one genre that has really only advanced along with console hardware, and you don't gain much by going back to older titles. Some EB stores have been giving copies of Arcade Treasures 3 away when you purchase other titles, and that's almost the best way to acquire this disc.

Score: 7.0/10

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