The controls for many of the games feel a bit off. Centipede is spot on, but Pong and Super Breakout’s paddle controls are maddening: too slow to react to initial button presses, but if you hold the d-pad down, the paddles go flying across the screen at speeds that boggle the human mind. It should also be noted that some games require the PSP to be held vertically to compensate for the original’s screen ratio.

Two games stand out above the rest: Pong and Warlords. Pong’s evolved forms, including an air-hockey skin and a pinball skin, are great, if completely unbalanced, fun, in spite of Pong’s 1980s-bad AI. Warlords is abominable in its original format, but the new version smooths out control and spiffs up the visuals, making for an intense game of four-way adversarial breakout. I had never played Warlords before popping in this UMD, so that might taint my judgment, but Warlords is the most fun you’ll get out of this package.

Developer Stainless Games wisely added an achievements-like Awards system to the game. Each evolved game has four different benchmark awards, encompassing anything from a high score to gaining an extra life to beating the third wave of Asteroids shooting only 50 times. Besides the never-ending high-score pursuit for most games, the Awards are the only thing bringing any replay value to the table.

The Atari 2600 games are unlocked all at once, after every single award has been unlocked. It would have made a lot more sense in terms of player gratification to unlock the old ROMs one by one, but instead you get them all in one deluge. The problem is, aside from Combat and Football, there’s not a lot worth your time here. And Combat has to be played with two people using the same PSP at the same time, so its value is dubious at best.

There is some wireless functionality, such as high-score uploading and ad hoc multiplayer for some titles, but it’s nothing even mildly exciting.
In the end, whether this package is worth picking up depends on just how much you want some classic arcade games in your pocket. The “evolved” angle isn’t worth much, unless you really want the ultimate Warlords experience (which is admittedly awesome). The graphical upgrades are not worth the price of admission, so if you’re looking for something more than a run-of-the-mill retro compilation, this is not your disc.