Midway Arcade Treasures 2

The first volume was a family album. This one carries an M rating on the front, and it earns it before you get past the second menu screen: Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3 in their arcade form, NARC with its drug-den flamethrower gore, Total Carnage shovelling sprites into a woodchipper. Midway's second treasury is the one that stopped pretending the company's fortune was built on Rampage cuteness.

Digital Eclipse handled the conversions again, and their work remains the reason these collections held up while so many other retro bundles curdled. The Mortal Kombat ports are the headline. Having MKII running from the arcade ROM, with its correct timing and correct inputs on a pad that can actually take a d-pad quarter-circle, mattered enormously in 2004, when the alternatives were compromised Genesis and SNES conversions or a MAME cabinet you had to build yourself. MK3 is the messier game of the pair and always was, but seeing it here uncut is the point.

The rest of the set is more scattered, and honestly more interesting for it. Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin' sit side by side as a record of Atari Games trying to sell polygonal physics to people who wanted Out Run, and they play now like a fascinating, juddering dead end. Gauntlet II supports four players and is still the purest argument ever made for coin-op design as a money extraction system. APB, where you police a small town as a traffic cop with a quota, is genuinely strange and remains the deepest cut on the disc. Xybots, Wizard of Wor, Timber, Kozmik Krooz'r, Arch Rivals, Cyberball 2072 — some are curios, some are chores, and the collection is honest enough not to pretend otherwise.

What lifts it above a ROM dump is the supporting material. Interviews with the people who built these machines, cabinet art, design documents. Ed Boon and John Tobias talking about digitising actors in a Chicago office is worth more than several of the lesser games included, and it frames the whole package as history rather than nostalgia.

Some titles here were mediocre in the arcade and time has not been kind. But a compilation that gives you the real Mortal Kombat II alongside APB and Hard Drivin' is not making a case for uniform quality — it is showing you what one company threw at the wall across fifteen years, and how much of it stuck harder than anyone expected.