Microsoft's Return of Arcade is one of a growing number of packages (which are commercial, shareware, or public domain) which enable you to play Arcade Games from the early 1980's on your mid-1990's PC.
In ROA, you can play the classic Arcade Games : Pac-Man, Pole Position, Galaxian, and Dig Dug.
The games in ROA were re-written and converted to the PC, and are not actually emulated.
So, the games do NOT feature original ROM code running on your PC under emulation. For details of emulators which do enable this, refer to my Arcade Game Emulation page.
However, the games in ROA are extremely close replicas and are missing very little from the original games.
Apparently, Microsoft brought the arcade machines and studied them very closely and tried to get as close as possible to the originals. But there are very minor differences. e.g. Pac Man doesn't do the blue/white blinking in between screens, and the Galaxians do not dodge the bullets like the real arcade game.
Only a real enthusiast with the original machine sitting next to their PC would notice any differences.
The graphics, sounds, and feel of these games are so close to the originals, that you will keep looking for the Coin-Slot in your PC !!
All the games are just as playable and addictive as the originals ever were.
Galaxian is just as playable as the original, as is Pac-Man.
Dig Dug is probably even better than I remember it, and I think the graphics are better than the arcade machine. But then again, it is hard to tell.
Pole Position is the most awkward game of the set. The keyboard controls are not satisfactory - there is no self-righting steering, so when you steer around a corner, you have to manually straighten the wheels. I would have expected that you would just take your fingers of the cursor and the car would steer straight. But, alas this is not the case.
To get around this, I had to use the mouse - something I usually don't like doing for games. After adjusting the mouse sensitivity (via the Pole Position set-up menu), I was able to control the car very well, and I soon found myself getting scores over 50,000.
Another thing I was surprised at was that Microsoft reproduced the original games, but did not go any further.
For example, I would have liked to be able to have 2 players on-screen at once in Galaxians or Dig-Dug just for a bit of fun.
Before I have the Arcade Purists moaning that the original games never had these features, let me just say that Microsoft developed these games to enable people to have fun, and if that means adding to and extending the games beyond their original form to give people more fun and better value for money, then so be it. It would have only been a bit more work for Microsoft to add this feature.
One thing that did scare me about ROA was the size of the Executable files. Galaxian's .EXE file, for example, is 1.0 MB. The original ROM code for Galaxian was 27 KB. All in all, ROA takes up over 6 MB of disk space. I think that Microsoft could have done a lot better here.
With that said though, the games do not push my Pentium 100 much at all. CPU utilisation with the games in full swing is less than 40%, so you can easily be surfing the Internet and doing loads of other things while playing these games.
There is a great "Boss Key". If you press ESC, the games are minimised and paused - great for when your Boss comes into the room, or for when the phone rings. This is a nice feature.
I think if I had to choose a favourite out of these games, I would have to say Pole Position, closely followed by Dig-Dug.
Anyway, I have played all games to death, and I still keep going back for more.
I highly recommend this package to anyone who loved and played these early 1980's arcade games.
It is just a shame that Microsoft didn't choose to write a general purpose emulator instead that could have run a whole swag of games instead of just converting 4 games over to the PC. This approach would have also resulted in a far more reasonable amount of disk space being used.
My review ratings below are to rate the game in its attempt to recreate the graphics, sound, and action of the original early 80's arcade games.
i.e. I have not rated the games according to the graphics, sound, and action standards of today's games, which are, offcourse, much higher.
The above review is Copyright © Moose O'Malley, October 20, 1996.
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