So I was going through the games I picked up this weekend and testing them last night. I popped in the Activision Anthology for the PS2, which I stumbled across at a Gamestop for about $0.65. And man, this is a REALLY impressive collection! It's not the emulation that's impressive - let's face it, it doesn't take much to emulate Atari 2600 games
- or the selection, which is pretty much every Activision game ever released for the 2600. It's everything they did AROUND the games that really puts it over the top. When you start the game, the main menu is a room setup like it's from the 80's. One of the first things I noticed was a radio that was playing classic 80's songs. That alone is impressive, because who goes out of their way to license music for a retro collection?
When you actually play the games, as you progress in each one you start unlocking things. At first it's simple stuff like weird play modes (first one I unlocked was a "tilt" mode that constantly tilts the screen at different angles - weird, and not really conducive to playing a game.
But the second thing I unlocked (playing River Raid) was the original TV ad for the game. Now that was VERY cool! I'm really wanting to put more time into the set now to see what other goodies are hidden there, and that's saying something because I thought I had played all of the 2600 I ever wanted to in my lifetime.
Oh, one other cool touch I noticed - pressing the triangle button will toggle you between color & black & white mode, so if you gamed on a b/w tv back in the day you can even recreate that experience. Just very, very cool.