Compared to past investments we've made in classic arcade titles, spending $.99 for a collection of six good games is ludicrously cheap. Considering there are another six games available as an in-app purchase (IAP) for only two more dollars, you've got a potential $3 investment that will net you 12 of the most memorable Midway titles in history. Included on the initial $.99 list are
Arch Rivals, Defender, Joust, Rampage, Root Beer Tapper, and
Spy Hunter. In addition to these, you can play on a "real" air hockey table, shoot pool, chuck basketballs, and throw a
Skee-Ball (titled "Roll Ball" here, likely for copyright reasons). Spend another couple bucks and you can add
APB, the
Gauntlet series,
NARC, Total Carnage, and
Wizard of Wor. All told, it's just a massive amount of retro cool, and
Midway Arcade doesn't have to stop there. The two IAP packs are presented in such a way that it looks like there's room for expansion, and Midway certainly isn't in danger of running out of classic games.
Since a big part of arcade gaming was competition for score, we were a little disappointed to see that high scores aren't loaded into each game, but are instead presented through Apple's Game Center. It's all fine and well to cruise through the Game Center looking at high scores and where I rank in each game, but Midway Arcade would have been much cooler if they had worked out a way to show all scores in the familiar game interface. The achievements are disappointing for the same reason. They reward players for starting a game, and winning prizes in the app, but how cool would it be to bolt on an achievement system for actions in a game like Rampage? "Got The Munchies: Ate 50 Soldiers" or something along those lines... The replay value proposition is really no different than it has been traditionally in arcade revival collections. We liked the dynamic of winning tickets (very authentic) and earning prizes, but there's no bigger payoff at some point, so you're only coming back to play the games you played to death decades ago. These issues are why I find the "remix" and reboot trend more exciting, but Midway Arcade will make a lot of arcade fundamentalists very happy.