Sega Arcade Classics

Ah, The Good Ol' Days... Character graphics, weird gurgly sound effects and gameplay from god's very own genitals. Sod your texture-mapped-polygons and poncey Gouraud shading, the early '80s were where it's at for blasting small, oddly shaped, brightly coloured character graphics into sparkly smithereens.

Arcade Gassics from GT Interactive is a celebration of some of the finest games from this golden age. featuring six different Williams arcade machines, this is possibly one of the most playable 'retro' games packages around. Unlike products such as Microsoft's Arcade, Arcade Gassics has been produced using a very different approach. Rather than just coding something very close to the original, the chaps at Williams have produced an arcade machine emulator and simply taken all of the original arcade code and stuck it on the CD.

So whaddya get? Joust (cue tumultuous applause). Bubbles (cue slight indifference but mild interest). Sinistar (cue look of bewilderment followed by surprise that you actually remember it). Robotron 2084 (cue intense jumping up and down), Stargate: Defender 2 (cue intense spooging), and finally - wait for it - Defender (cue the biggest puddle of spooge you have ever seen in your entire life, complete with fireworks, grunting, groaning and much pleasure). What more could you want, eh?

This really is an excellent package and of all of the 'retro' packs. I would imagine that this would be the most popular. Forget your Atari VCS Windows 95 nonsense, this is the thing to have. Obviously it's going to appeal to people who were actually playing these things back in 1985 or whatever, but there are a lot of us about. "It's so bloody hard!" seems to be the one thing that everyone acknowledges. Yeah. yeah, the graphics look awful on absolutely all of them, but it's the gameplay that counts. Joust is still one of the best two-player games around. It looks naff, but sitting on an ostrich and jumping on people's heads is just incredibly satisfying!