1877: Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Volume 1 \\ Dreamcast \\ All games & Who Owns JOUST Now!
1Playing Joust and a bit of the other five games in Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Volume 1 for Dreamcast, in the emulator Flycast!
My other Dreamcast games playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZO3OPzPjIzPhMnh5mqym0TEQ4oNSH2FD
0:00 - start
2:13 - Joust
13:30 - Yellow version?
33:25 - Robotron
34:57 - Defender
37:22 - Defender II
38:39 - Sinistar
41:39 - Bubbles
48:03 - more Joust
56:35 - high score run
1:04:40 - who owns Joust now?
1:15:50 - Jeff Vavasour
1:18:27 - Warner Bros.
1:24:43 - Joust PS3 small print
I got this because I had Joust on PS3 but finally played it NOT through component video and realized the playfield graphics were blurry, whereas this DC version WAS blurry back in the day 'cause it didn't support the DC's VGA-out, but ripped and played in flycast, it's nice and sharp. ; )
BUT toward the end of this session I was googling around like what happened to Williams/Midway, why aren't they doing game ports anymore (the answer is they just do gambling stuff now), and found OH well there was a later compilation on PS3, Midway Arcade Origins, disc-only. And it's got Joust. And a video I found of it looks not-blurry. Shoot! So now I gotta get that one. I only knew about THIS Dreamcast one because I actually had it back in the day. But in the PS3 era I got sick of discs and started ignoring disc-only releases so that would be how I missed knowing about Midway Arcade Origins I guess. Kind of funny because Joust was one of the first games I got on PS3, the standalone downloadable version. That was 2007. Midway Arcade Origins wasn't until 2012, the year before the PS4 came out.
Anyway, this DC one's okay. You can switch to the "Yellow" version of Joust which I think means you could do the kill-the-pterodactyl-over-and-over exploit http://seanriddle.com/ptero.html . But it shares the same high score list with what is probably the "Green" version. : P There are two unskippable grainy videos when you start the disc up. There's an Auto-Save feature (I think you have to enable this separately for each of the 6 games in the compilation?), but no Auto-Load, so you have to remember to LOAD manually each time you boot up! Oh dear.
The games play fine as far as I can tell, and look sharp. Defender, Defender II, Robotron, Sinistar are too flashy for my sore eyeballs. Bubbles is...Bubbles. So yeah, pretty good version of Joust--and as a .chd the rip only takes up 18.9 MB of HD space! ^ _^
The sound cut out on me twice so far in different games in the compilation--Joust and Defender II--and I had to reload the chd in Flycast to get sound working again. Not sure if it's a Flycast bug or a game bug.
There's a black border at the top of the Joust playfield only you can't see it because the top of the Joust playfield is also all black, so until you memorize exactly where it is you'll be bouncing suddenly off the invisible ceiling.
Jeff Vavasour (credits: Emulation Programmer, Technical Director; "started Backbone Entertainment's Vancouver studio; founder of Code Mystics; previously "Chief Technical Officer for both Digital Eclipse Software and Backbone Entertainment" https://www.codemystics.com/company.shtml ) says of this collection on his old web site http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/games.html#dcmidway1 "a port of Williams Arcade Classics from Windows 95 except without the interviews"; "used my portable emulation core from the Shockwave project," which was these and 4 other Midway games free and playable in-browser; the old midway.com links he gives for them there now redirect to a Warner Bros. movie and TV page. HM.
Oh! In the video I mumbled through the Wikipedia page for WMS Industries, trying to find who owns Joust now. WMS went 100% gambling. But on the Wikipedia page for Midway Games, it notes that Warner Bros. bought most of their assets after MG went bankrupt in 2009. That's when WB Games got Mortal Kombat, for instance, which they're still publishing. Ah yeah the Wikipedia WGB article says specifically they got Joust (hah my old game The Matrix Online) is mentioned in that article too ; D) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Games#History . So it's Warner Bros. Games that's sitting on Joust! They actually publish as "Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment"--and they were the ones who published Midway Arcade Origin in 2012. But aside from MK, that's the last Midway thing they did as far as I can see on Mobygames https://www.mobygames.com/company/814/warner-bros-interactive-entertainment-inc/games/
4/24/24
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