by Vinson Chen

Created on: July 23, 2010

Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits features a small range of very old arcade games. The compilation itself was made by Digital Eclipse in 2000, but the arcade games are all from the eighties. Unfortunately for Midway and Digital Eclipse, critics found the lack of ingenuity boring and thus rated Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits as a whole rather poorly. After all, the Game Boy Advance game itself simply uses old games plastered on to a new port for the portable gaming console. However, critics are not always correct. It is up to the gamer to decide whether he enjoys old 8-bit sprites or if he prefers higher quality gaming. 

The four games that Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits allows for play are Defender, Sinistar, Robotron: 2084, and Joust. The main screen of Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits is actually rather cleverly done. The gamer uses the D-pad to scroll through four arcade machines. When one arcade machine is scrolled to, a large title of the game to be played booms over all four arcade consoles. The order of games is Defender, Robotron, Joust, and Sinistar, and that will be the order of review.

Defender was made back in 1980 and was a two dimensional side-scrolling shooter game. The gamer flies left and right and can move up and down in order to shoot down enemy aliens. The goal of the game is to protect a handful of astronauts from invading aliens, so the gamer must use a spam of A mashing in order to shoot down the enemies before they can touch the spaceship. It is a very fun game and sold itself very well when it was a legitimate arcade game.

Robotron: 2084 was made in 1982 and features killing robots. However, the gamer needs to save captured humans this time instead of having to protect them. Unlike Defender, the gamer now stands in a very limited square screen and moves around in only that limited area. In there he must shoot down all the robots to progress to further levels.

Joust was also made back in 1982. In this game, the gamer plays as a knight riding an ostrich and must travel across a side-scrolling screen in a platformer game. There are obstacles like enemy knights that try to knock the protagonist into the lava below. 

Finally, Sinistar was made in 1982 as well. It is a space shooting game where the gamer plays a spaceship and shoots down a multitude of enemy alien fighters.  

All in all, the games featured are very playable despite being 30 years old. They are classic and deserve to be treated with respect and are really rather fun. In my opinion, the game is a must have for Game Boy Advance users.

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