Atari Anniversary Advance (Game Boy Advance)

Following in the footsteps of other Game Boy Advance retro collections such as Namco Museum and Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced, Infogrames' Atari Anniversary Advanced is a package of the arcade hits of yesteryear. This game features six of Atari's most famous arcade games--Tempest, Centipede, Battlezone, Asteroids, Super Breakout, and Missile Command--and they are all, for the most part, faithfully reproduced on the GBA's small screen.

The most notable difference is that the three vector games of the bunch, Tempest, Battlezone and Asteroids, are drawn with pixels instead, as the original versions of those games used special hardware and a special monitor in the arcade. Taking that into account, the developer, Digital Eclipse, has successfully translated these games to the Game Boy Advance, ensuring that even your tiny ship in Asteroids is visible. In addition to that, Tempest is also playable in portrait mode, which accurately reproduces the original aspect ratio of the game. As it stands, every game retains the classic feel of its arcade counterpart in terms of graphics and sound, although the games do seem to play a little bit faster than the originals. While it would have been nice to have seen some added features, like a multiplayer option in Battlezone, there simply aren't many bad things that can be said about this collection.

Ultimately, this is a solid collection of games that are still just as playable as they were when they were first released many years ago, and it's an excellent addition to the library of any gamer interested in classic games.