Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

It took roughly five months from announcement to execution to get six classic Midway titles onto the PlayStation Network. The Midway games represent just about the only third-party IP present on the PlayStation Store, and they fared well for arcade rehashes in general but could have been better in a few key ways. Let’s get the rundown title by title to see how they did in reviews overall.

I’ll be charitable and go from the highest rated game on down using ratings from IGN and Gamespot, using the average score. There are few to no ratings pages on either GameRankings or MetaCritic, and by and large Gamespy has stayed away from them, so those two sites are all I’m working from.

Let’s get the most glaring fault with all the games out of the way up front: none of them shipped with voice chat.

7.6 Mortal Kombat II
First up is probably the highest-profile title, Mortal Kombat II. Both IGN and Gamespot reviewed them, with a “Decent” 7.3 and “Fair” 7.9 respectively. It delivers an online-playable fighting experience with occasional slight to severe lag issues. Reviews mentioned that the leaderboards have a hard-to-understand scoring system, and that you can’t see the PSN name of your opponent, leading online matches to become random skill matchups at best. With the most recent full-retail releases of Tekken and Virtua Fighter dismissing online play entirely this is the only online fighter available for the PS3.

5.8 Gauntlet II
One of the original members of the popular hack-and-slash genre, Gauntlet II picked up a “Mediocre” 5.5 from IGN and “Fair” 6.1 from Gamespot, giving us four-player offline or online play, leaderboards, and that’s right, no voice chat to help coordinate your gameplay. The graphics are also arcade-perfect, meaning they’re 20 years old.

5.7 Joust
IGN gave Joust a “Passable” 6.1. Its timelessness and accessibility hold up in this translation, but it lacks the redone graphics and backgrounds from the Xbox Live version of the game, and of course the XBL version has voice chat. I like Joust myself, and have it in a Midway collection disc for the PS2, so I’m in no rush to pick it up from the PSN.
Update: Gamespot has given Joust a 5.2 review, citing glitchy and laggy online play, occasional sound glitches, and bad-looking menus dragging things down. That brings its average to 5.7.

5.5 Rampage: World Tour
Coming in at a “Mediocre” 5.6 from IGN and 5.3 from Gamespot is Rampage: World Tour. The single player action is hobbled by the inability to save the game and online play is just about as limited as the offline. Having no save option is a very poor decision for these kinds of arcade remixes — we want to enjoy the arcade classic, but if we’re not putting quarters into the console, does it make any sense to have us start over every time? The game does allow up to 3 players total, but again with no voice chat, you’re just bashing buildings with your own brutish thoughts to contend with. I was looking forward to Rampage: World Tour, and it definitely looks better than the ancient version of the original Rampage on the Midway Arcade collection I have for the PS2, but again no voice chat keeps it from sounding fun.

4.2 Rampart
We fall below the 5 mark with the castle-builder Rampart. Dinged for an unusually bad idea of not allowing fine control of the pointer during rebuilding sessions — something critical to the game — Rampart also suffers from very loud sound in the menus and very soft sound in the game. Three players are supported, but with terrible controls you won’t want to try it. With control and easily-fixable sound issues like that, I’d say it’s charitable to give it the “Poor” rating it got from both IGN with a 4.3 and Gamespot with a 4.0.

2.7 Championship Sprint
This version of Sprint not only brings up the rear in the whole set of games, but its “Terrible” 2.8 from IGN and similar 2.5 from Gamespot takes the title of worst PS3 game yet from the far-better-looking Super Rub-A-Dub, which came in at 2.9 at IGN. Gamespot couldn’t bear to touch it, so they haven’t posted a review. Laggy online play, a game that needs to have the original racing wheel to be worth trying, and in general just a poor game to decide to port all contribute to its low score. The reviewer even laments that it was Championship Sprint, not its successor Super Sprint that was ported because of the former’s ability only to have two players. Super Sprint could have had three players. But with control and core game design so bad, does it really matter?

The Verdict
The six games aren’t all bad, and actually score not too far below where most arcade remixes score. Nearly all of them could have been made markedly better with some small improvements that shouldn’t have taxed the developers unnecessarily. Things like being able to save your single-player game, implementing better controls, and ensuring the menus weren’t abominable in terms of look or sound volume all sound like no-brainer changes for a game. While a patch might do those things, I doubt one would come out for them.

I’d say a firmware patch that integrates voice chat outside of the games themselves would likely boost the fortunes of some of these games. I might give Gauntlet II, Rampage, and Joust a shot in those circumstances.

If you’ve got a PS3, have you bought any of these, and do you think the reviews were too harsh or not harsh enough?