These classics haven't evolved much.

Retro compilations have been a staple of gaming for some time now. Developers with roots back to the early days of gaming have been cashing in on their back catalogs and gamers’ nostalgia with mechanical regularity since gaming embraced the disc format.

Now Atari has released Atari Classics Evolved, which, despite the “evolved” in the title, is, at its heart, a classic compilation. 11 games from Atari’s arcade heritage gather together on one UMD for the PlayStation Portable, in their original form and in a new “evolved” design.

Whether or not gamers will be interested in any given package like this hinges on the selection of games, so here we go: Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Battlezone, Centipede, Millipede, Lunar Lander, Missile Command, Pong, Super Breakout, Tempest, and Warlords are the 11 featured games. In addition, around 50 games from the Atari 2600 can be unlocked for play (more on that later), but they’re Atari-published games, so those of you hoping for something awesome like Frogger or Pitfall are out of luck.

Since Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe and Centipede and Millipede are basically the same games, that lowers the value of the package a bit. Almost everyone knows, if not loves, these games, so I won’t detail each, but a few are worth mentioning: Lunar Lander is still great, the evolved version of Warlords is amazing, and playing Tempest will remind you that, despite all of Jeff Minter’s whining, Space Giraffe was basically just Tempest.

The evolved versions of most of the games are simply disappointing graphical upgrades. In some cases, they actually make the games worse: Asteroids works better with a minimalist presentation, and Super Breakout’s evolved form is annoying due to the sparkling, glowing tail effects put on the ball. For reference, the evolved versions are a lot like the classic arcade games you can drop $5 a piece for on Xbox Live Arcade—in fact, the version of Missile Command on this disc is identical to XBLA’s version.