Activision Anthology Remix (Mac)

Rating:
Summary: Nice piece of retro gaming.
Review: Gamers of my generation (thirtysomething), among others, fondly remember the Atari 2600 console. Come on, you remember it - the black joystick with the bright red button, the black console with four switches and a slot for game cartridges... the clicks, bleeps and bloops of games like Pitfall, Atlantis and Megamania: A Space Nightmare? If you do, then the Activision Anthology will bring a smile to your face; among the many other recent efforts to revive classic video games, MacPlay has published this collection of 75 games for the retro gamer in all of us.

So with a certain nostalgia, I installed and fired up the Anthology, and I was a bit surprised at the main menu: a fairly good approximation of the room of the neighbor kid in my neighborhood who actually had an Atari. (Well, the actual room wasn't so clean, with quite a few more pop cans strewn about.) Also surprisingly, the main screen greets you with some appropriately retro music - in my case, "Eye in the Sky" by the Alan Parsons Project. The music plays on as you choose and play a game from the rack; it's all tongue-in-cheek, of course, with tracks from my middle school days by groups like 'A Flock of Seagulls and' 'Whodini.'

The game emulation is perfect, except that you don't have to load up cartridges and flick that reset switch, and in a very short time I found myself trying to remember if you get more treasure faster in Pitfall by starting off running to the left, and if the underground shortcuts were worth the effort it took to jump over the scorpions. Of course, I don't have the old black joystick I was used to, although you can hook up a modern stick if you wish (I don't have one, and just used my keyboard).

So, you ask yourself, aren't these old games too easy and slow... don't they get boring quickly? The programmers have taken an interesting approach to this concern by mixing up these old school, aggressively blocky-looking games: if you wish, you can play the games in various "enhanced" game modes to up the challenge. For example, if, like me, you find Demon Attack too easy, you can set the game to play in "cube" mode, in which the game is set onto the faces of a spinning cube in the middle of the screen. As the manual says, "only the most mentally dexterous player will be able to compensate for the movements." Umm, yeah. There are several other modes that distort and add to the visuals of the original game ("disco," "bungee," and a stomach-turning mode dubbed "whirl," among many others).

Additionally, you can save games, keep high scores, and as you play along you can even unlock "patches" of previous versions.

My overall impression? MacPlay continues to impress me with their willingness to release a broad variety of titles, some quite mainstream and popular (the Baldur's Gate series, the supremely classic Fallout series) as well as games like this with pure retro appeal. True, some of these details of products like this will be lost on all but the true aficionado, but obviously none of these games are meant to compete graphically with modern offerings - this is a product intended for the old-school gamer who wants to resurrect a bit of gaming history, with a few new twists.

I encountered no bugs in my use of the Anthology, although the main screen interface takes some getting used to and isn't always intuitive, as it mainly employs the arrow keys and has none of the point-and-click mentality that we Mac users not only expect but, well, have encoded in our DNA. I find the collection to be an overall well-done offering; the added details do bring an enjoyable and added nostalgia to these games. The system requirements (400 Mhz G4) are modest, and the price is appropriate. I recommend this anthology for anyone who, like me, grew up in the arcades of the 80's and loves to emulate old games on modern hardware.