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We all love to reminisce about old games. Heck, there's a big old Commodore 64 appreciation thread going on right now on our message board. What we sometimes forget when we remember fondly those games of yore is that sometimes they are better left in our memories. We were younger then, and game-time was much simpler due to resources available. I remember being able to sit down and play River Raid for hours on end, and sometimes you wish you could do it all over again. But, when you finally do get to play the old cartridge once more, it's hard to take for more than a few minutes at a time. That's exactly the way I feel about the new Activision Anthology. Over 40 classic Activision games for the Atari 2600 are faithfully reproduced right here on your PS2. Activision carried that system in its heyday and don't let anyone tell you different. So, what it amounts to is some of the best games that were available to play in the early eighties. Unlike some other compilations, everything is emulated perfectly, from the graphics and sound to the control. All that's missing is the upright joystick with the single orange button, but it works quite well with today's controllers.
While I still have a problem playing any of these games for a length of time, they've done a good job of adding replay value. It's still all about the high scores for the classic games, and Activision Anthology challenges you to reach certain scores or levels in order to unlock additional modes and content. The extra modes of play are really just special effects applied to the screen, whether it's a star field scrolling across the playing field or having four screens texture mapped to a spinning cube. They're all there to breathe a little new life into the games as well as to provide some artificial difficulty. The user interface is pretty darn cool. They've got it set up so that your Atari is sitting in front of a small monitor, and you have all your games in a carousel to the left of it. Once you select a game, you can see the cartridge, the box art, the instructions, and any extras associated with it. The cartridge is plugged in, and the game is loaded up ready for you to decide if you want to play the classic version or throw one of the new effects on it. Another excellent addition is the wicked '80s sound track that plays in the background of your room the whole time, stuff like Mexican Radio and We're Not Gonna Take It. It's kind of like it's playing on your stereo, since it doesn't stop to reload at the beginning and end of your game session. All of the games' music and special effects (the bleeps and the bloops) play right along as if you were working off actual cart. Even though I don't feel like there's an open spot in my gaming schedule for playing classic games (I'd rather stick to "Remember back in Kaboom when you...."), Anthology has a mesmerizing quality about it. Once I started playing and listening to some of the old '80s tunes, it just became real comfortable to keep going. Some of the unlocked content is hilarious, like the Megamania commercial. This definitely stands out as one of the best compilations to ever hit a console, but you have to consider if it's still possible to get lost in the gameplay as we could once before.
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