Review
Release Date: 11.20.2002
Platform:
PlayStation 2Developer:
Activision, Inc.Publisher:
Activision, Inc.Reviewed by
Brian J. Balsan on 5.21.2003
Why don't companies do this more often?
Way too many times, when a compilation of old games ... usually arcade titles ... are made, the user interface is either barely there or nonexistent. Games like the original
Activision Classics for PSone or any version of the
Sega Smash Pack give you a collection of old classics and little else to spruce up the age-old games.
Namco Museum came so terribly close, but gave you all the neat goodies up front and relied purely on nostalgia to keep the longevity factor of the actual games going.
Then there's
Activision Anthology, a game that gets everything so right ... then tosses in a few unsightly post-production gaming bugs.
To properly explain what this “anthology” is all about, you'll have to set the “way-back machine” to circa 1980, when a group of Atari employees, fed up with the current regime, left in protest. See, back before Miyamoto was popular, Atari and other companies would not allow the programmers to include their names into the games they had made. The initial reason is the fear that another company would find out who made the games and buy him or her out. This disallowance of proper crediting agitated many creators and developers in the day, and defiance of the bigwigs would eventually produce the first "Easter egg.”
But the previously mentioned Atari employees took another route. They left the company entirely and created their own: Activision, the first-ever third-party game developer, and the first to freely provide their names on the games they so lovingly developed.
Activision Anthology is a mass-collection of some 45-plus games. Many of these titles haven't been seen in any of Activision's other compilations, and at least two of them have never even been released, possibly victims of the videogame crash of the mid-80's (another story for another day). By itself,
Anthology is perhaps the biggest collection of classic games to ever be put on one disc, but it's the extras that keep it going beyond the initial novelty of playing 20-year-old titles.
When you begin the game, you are brought to a wonderful setup that would remind any longtime gamer of the entertainment center they used to have in the 80's. Here, you will see an Atari 2600 system connected to an old color-TV, a radio/tape-player that will blare one of twelve tunes from the era (A-Ha, Twisted Sister, Soft Cell, etc), a corkboard for patch-gathering (a gimmick Activision had was a mail-order promotion for iron-on patches), a rack with a huge list of Activision classics (complete with boxes and instruction manuals), and a list of games and how many “unlockables” each game possesses.
That's right, most of the games hold anywhere between one to five extras for you to access, and how you get to them depends on either how high you score, how fast you race, or even how many times you play. Reaching the goals will unveil one of three types of unlockables: a patch for that particular game, a “gameplay mode,” which can be chosen just before you start a particular title (i.e. “Cube Mode” will allow you to play an Atari game in a spinning 3D cube), and a commercial, which will advertise the game you had to play to unlock it, all from the early 80's. Can
YOU find the commercial starring a young Phil Hartman?
Even with all of these fantastic extras and bonuses, there are some faults, which are considerably bad enough to drop the score. For whatever reason, Activision saw fit to rush the game into completion for the Christmas season. What makes this confusing is that, outside of the hardcore gamers and oldtimers, no one would race to pick this up, whether it’s out for Christmas or for Easter. Besides that, anyone anticipating this is probably pretty patient. Because of the rush-job, a patch for one of the games is mysteriously AWOL (Cosmic Commuter, making the "1" on the unlockables list unnecessary), and another patch may become inaccessible if another goody is opened first, meaning that you'll have to delete your save if you want to get the patch. Even more frustrating, a couple of the unlockables seem to have a 50-50 chance of being unattainable. In these cases, you'll need to reset the PS2, load the saved game, and try again. A patch that may appear to be permanently locked away in a specific game due to a programming bug could suddenly appear when you turn on your PS2 sometime later. Finally, a long-promised Internet accessibility function for
Anthology is also missing. The connectivity would have permitted the downloading of other unreleased games and prototypes, but ultimately never happened. Perhaps the touch-tone phone on the entertainment center menu screen is all that remains of this idea....
The sometimes-frustrating factor for achieving the unlockables nearly ruins an otherwise picture-perfect compilation. It would be a dream to see another collection like this utilize the same ideas, but not simply restricting itself to commercials and gameplay modes: There are undoubtedly a bunch of magazine advertisements, interviews and coverage of specific games that could be taken out of the mothballs and shown to the public once again. Wouldn't it be a dream where a special requirement in Pitfall unlocks a detailed map and preferred route to get all the treasures?
It is highly doubtful another 2600 collection like this will come down the pipeline again anytime soon....
But an Intellivision collection using this idea would be sweet. Mmm ...
Dreadnaught Factor ...
