Williams Arcad Classics

Defender, Joust and Defender 2 may well be incredibly famous classics, but Bubbles just doesn't make the grade. It's a good game, and fans of Crystal Quest will love it, but it ain't famous.

Good gravy! If this isn't one of those collections of old games rather like Namco Museum Piece! Why, back in my day, we had no such thing.Yes, Im from a generation where video games went,Bloop! and children were seen and not heard. Why, I remember it like it was just yesterday. I would wander down to my local gaming emporium right by the soda jerk it was and pop a couple of farthings into an old-time slot-gaming-machine, as we were wont to call them in those days. My favorite was Defender.

OK, so admittedly, I'm actually in my early twenties, but I still remember Defender when it was "new. The best thing about Williams' old games was their sheer originality, and that's something PlayStation owners now have the chance to experience first-hand. Every one of the "classic Williams' coin-ops has been translated perfectly, and I mean perfectly, to the colossally powerful 32-bit machine.The PlayStation runs a clever emulator which effectively fools your machine into thinking its a ten-year-old arcade cabinet.

The graphics, sounds, even bugs, have all been translated flawlessly, and in the case of Defender and Robotron, improved slightly by function of the PlayStation's excellent joypad.The games at your disposal are all (with one exception) benchmark standards for their genre.The list reads like a video-game Hall of Fame: Defender, Defender 2 (also known as Stargate),Joust, Bubbles (the possible exception) Sinistar and Robotron! Any one of these games will set the pulses pounding in your geriatric gaming chums. And all of them play quite beautifully as well.

An argument exists that video games have gotten much better and much more enjoyable since these games first did the rounds, but these (again, with the exception of Bubbles) have never been bettered. If you want to play some old-style games, this collection could be even better than Namco's. Instead of the 3D museum found in that game, you have a chance to watch full-motion video interviews with the creators of the games, something that no self-respecting game fan should miss. In fact, some of the spazzier, more paranoid people who work here thought that the interview section was actually more fun than the games themselves.