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RETRO FANS UNITE!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 9
Date: September 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Midway has officially changed the title lineup on this collection, show your anger and write them a bad review!!!!

THEY REMOVED STUN RUNNER, STEEL TALONS, and the original MORTAL COMBAT....

Once again, the only way to play STUN RUNNER at home LEGALLY, NO MAME, is to buy an Arcade JAMMA, or the only console version, which is pretty good, ATARI LYNX...

I really don't understand...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: October 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

...how the team at Midway felt comfortable releasing this compilation this way. It's as though they didn't even play-test it. But since we all know they did, it suggests a cheap, quick-and-easy effort in an attempt to cash in on the tail end of the nostalgia boom.

Lets get into this...

(As a side note, there is sound issues with almost all the games included.)

The Mortal Kombat titles are easily the strongest selling point of the game. I know its the reason I bought it! Both versions are very choppy with grizzled, pixelated graphics. The sound is equally horrible to the point where its practcally unbearable. Its like it was recorded with absolutely no bass at all with the treble turned up all the way. Trust me, you'll hate it after the first few seconds. If you were hoping for a clean translation with high expectations with the PS2, forget it. You will feel like you were playing on a SNES with crappier sound.

The other game I was interested in was Wizard of Wor. Again, a huge disapointment. There are problems with the sound being out of place with random bleeps and blips for no reason, and the gameplay itself is waaaaay faster than the original to the point where you will be button mashing instead of plotting out a course through the maze.

Next up, with frustrations rising, I tried Primal Rage. As before with the MK games, this had all the same problems listed. Another disapointment.

Forget about Pit Fighter. You will play it for a total of six seconds before you realize that the speed of the game is way too fast to the point where its unplayable. That's right - UNPLAYABLE.

The other games are to a lesser extent higher in quality of translation, but the problem is, most people - myself included won't be buying the game to play Xybots or Wacko.

And one other thing: Would it kill Midway to actually include a decent handbook with the game. I mean really, its common sense especially for the MK games. People are going to want to know how to do the moves. I guess a they were too cheap to include a few extra pages so players wouldn't have to go online and print them out.

If you want this for Mortal Kombat II or III, think again.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: November 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

If you want this title for Mortal Kombat II or MKIII, think again. Upon receiving this game, I was immensely excited with my anticipation of being reunited with the classic Mortal Kombat II. The game looks great. The controls are there. But the one huge turn-off is that this game is so unplayable in 1-player mode. The CPU opponent is so ridiculously cheap and difficult that you are lucky if you can even get passed the 3rd fighter. I used to beat the old arcade and SNES versions of MKII, but cannot barely pass the 3rd or 4th opponent.

If you want to play against other people then the game is great. But if you plan on just enjoying the game for yourself and want to play the CPU? Good luck. Because you will need a ton of it.

Mortal Kombat saves this terrible collection

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 18
Date: October 30, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Mortal Kombat 2 & 3 are the main highlight of this collection. Treasure one had better amount of good games but this one got better quality.

Sound quality for Mortal Kombat 3 is not so good IF you use TV speakers due to the DCS sound system but sounds great when you use amplifier system. There is some baffle noise during the short 'charcter icons on mountain' screen but not much or none during games. This is not Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, so there are only 14 characters... but this game is much better than Triology for PSOne. Graphics for both Mortal Kombat games are great, just like arcade. Rampage world tour is another great game, totally different and better than the original.

Mortal Kombat II - great game!
Mortal Kombat 3 - great!
Gauntlet II - great, unlimited quarter helps this game because it is meant to be a quarter sucking machine. In Gauntlet I master players can play forever with one quarter however this no longer possible in Gauntlet II.
Spy Hunter II - bad, split screen concept killed this game
Xybots - horrible! tiny screen during gameplay is lame
NARC - good, 2-D side scroll mayhem with stupid doors
APB - average...
Cyberball 2072 - below average but better than 10-yard fight
Timber - HORRIBLE! much worse than Tapper
Total Carnage - good game, similar to Smash TV but better
Pit Fighter - HORRIBLE! very cheesy, good for multi-player laugh
Wizard of Wor - HORRIBLE! Atari 2600 quality
Xenophobe - average game, small screen, meant to be 3 player game
Primal Rage - good game, clay dino fighting, kinda cool
Arch Rivals - decent game that quickly turns horrible and dusty
Rampage World Tour - great game, much better than first.
Kozmik Krooz'r - below average space shooter
Championship Sprint - good game, feels like radio control racing
Hard Drivin' - HORRIBLE! very slow, choppy and blocky
Wacko - HORRIBLE! A reject that never made its way into arcades.

If you have played or seen these games back in the days in arcades then you will feel like you own these machines, watching the demos is sweet. The variety of multi-players games is cool.

Overall this collection is decent. If you like MK2 and MK3 then buy it! BTW this game is on sale at Target and Toys R Us for $15.

I bought a PS2 solely for this game...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: November 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

When I heard that a compilation game featuring almost arcade- quality ports of MK2 and MK3 was being released, I had to have it- but I didn't have a PS2 to play it on. I now own one, and this compilation of old-school arcade favorites. Out of the 20 games, I've only tried 4, so I'll go through them here.

Championship Sprint- Old-School racing in the tradition of RC Pro-Am and Super Off Road; the camera is directly overhead of the track. Controls are very twitchy and I suspect you'd need a lot of practice before you can make it through a race without hitting the walls.

Hard Drivin'- A 3-D driving simulator; it's somewhat slow and choppy though. The stunt track is fun to drive on & destroy your car.

Mortal Kombat II- the reason I bought the game. It's not nearly as bad as a previous review has made it out to be- the characters are large, colorful and almost arcade quality, especially if you opt to enlarge the screen. Fatalities are easy to pull off thanks to the D-pad, even though you have barely enough time to type them out- and they're just as bloody and noisy as you remember them. Sure, there's some slowdown, and the AI is as cheap and unfair as ever (the computer can throw you even if its character is slipping on one of Sub-Zero's Ground Freezes), but this is as close as you're going to get to arcade-quality Mortal Kombat II without actually having the cabinet in your house.

Mortal Kombat 3- It's a good fighting game, but to me Mortal Kombat peaked with part 2. MK3 introduced the dreaded "dial-a-combo" system, which I admit I kinda liked when I first tried it but it quickly grows tiresome. MK3's fatalities were definitely lamer than its predecessor's as well. Finally, the emulation in this compilation is flawed- for example, the music played at the "Finish Him/Her" screen continues playing even after a fatality is performed.

I'm happy with this game- especially when I remember how psyched I was to be paying almost sixty dollars for the SNES version of MKII 10 years ago- with much smaller characters and vastly compromised sound effects compared with the arcade game.

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

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 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.

Sweet

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: December 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The second installment in Midway's Arcade Treasures series is undoubtadly the best; featuring many games that are still a blast to play, not to mention many games that I myself grew up with and remember quite fondly. Here, we get Mortal Kombat 2 and 3, NARC, Pit Fighter, Rampage World Tour, Total Carnage, Primal Rage, Arch Rivals, and plenty more. It's to be noted now that Mortal Kombat 2 is much harder than I remember it being, but it still looks and plays great, as does 3. NARC is still a smash to play, as is Pit Fighter and the aforementioned games. Cyberball 2072, Xenophobe, and Spy Hunter 2 are solid enough as well, but there are a few duds here as well scattered throughout the gems. Gauntlet 2 (though I was never that much of a fan of Gauntlet to begin with), APB, Championship Sprint, and Hard Drivin' aren't anything to write home about, but the good outweighs the bad here. However, where's the original Mortal Kombat? Or how about Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3? Or Area 51, Maximum Force, or any other light gun shooter for that matter (and there were quite a few), but none of them are here, or on any other Midway compilation for that matter. Oh well, at least we get some of Midway's best games here with this collection. All in all, Midway Arcade Treasures 2 is one of the best retro compilations on the market, and while it does feature some duds, there are some gems thrown in to boot.

Even the lesser known titles feel classic

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: October 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Unlike most people, I didn't get this game for either MK games, rather for Total Carnage (Smash Tv is one of my all time favorites). That right there was worth my money. Then I relized something, "there are 19 more games to play, HOLY SH*T". Overall, anyone who wants a few multi-player games should get this, despite the FEW noticable flaws.

This is The Best Compilation Arcade game ever!!!!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game has pretty good graphics and a good amount of games and variety on one disc. I like, Total Carnage, MK 2,3, Gauntlet 2, Cyberball 2072, Pit Fighter, Arch Rivals, Xybots, Championship Sprint, Primal Rage and Rampage World Tour. But games like Wacko, Hard Drivin, Xenophobe, Kozmik Kroozer, APB and Spy Hunter 2 arent worth your time. This game also includes interviews about the games on here which I think are cool and interesting. I would Pay 20$ for this game. If your seeking more compilation games, see my reviews on the following games, Midway arcade Treasures 1 and 3, Atari Anthology, Intellivision Lives, Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2, and Taito Legends 1. Also coming soon is... Namco Museum 50th anniversary, Taito Legends 2, Capcom Classics Collection Volume 1 and Sega Classics Collection and/or Sega Genesis Collection.

Enjoy Mortal Kombat 2 and 3 !!!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 3
Date: October 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've bought this game, because I'm a Mortal Kombat-fan. Midway Arcade Treasures 2 has Mortal Kombat 2 and 3 and I enjoy these games. Other games are not interesting I only play Mortal Kombat 2 and 3 on MAT2. Also the graphics are very good. And both MK-games run very quickly. Buy it !!! Only in Mortal Kombat 2: If you want to know Kitana's "kiss of death"-fatality; press and hold LK (low kick) then type forward twice, down, forward and release LK.

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