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Activision Anthology

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Activision Anthology

If you played the original versions of the three games in this compilation when you were, say, 14 years old you'd now be facing the harsh reality of life as a 40-year-old video games fan. As such the idea of turning the clock back is probably appealing. But if it's a choice between reliving a jumpers-for-goalposts football match on the school field or a mouldy old VCS game, few would be advised to plump for the indoors option.

If you really were desperate to relive your childhood experiences of interactive entertainment it's hard to believe that a better way than this has not presented itself during the intervening decades.

It's even harder to imagine that any younger player would want to experience such prehistoric offerings - although it is amusing to watch them struggle with the concept that this really did used to represent the state-of-the-art in video games technology.

The three titles included here are amongst the most famous of Activision's games published on the old Atari VCS (aka Atari 2600) home console. The name though refers to a PS2 compilation which included 50-odd different games. You wouldn't expect quite that many for the mobile version, but the tiny 48KB file size of this game suggests that more could easily have been squeezed in.

Pitfall is probably the most famous of the trio, one of the earliest ever platform games and clearly heavily influenced by the then current Raiders of the Lost Ark. You've 20 minutes to find 32 different pieces of treasure as you jump over quicksand, avoid scorpions and swing across pits clinging to vines. Which all sounds terribly exciting, but like most games of the time it's ruthlessly difficultly and patently unfair in the unforeseeable traps it places in your way.

River Raid is the most straightforward of the games, being a simple vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up. Apart from shooting all the boats and aeroplanes in your way your only other consideration is picking up tanks of fuel to ensure your rampage continues. It gets incredibly repetitive almost instantly and the only real tactical consideration is how to vary your speed.

The final game is H.E.R.O., which apparently stands for 'Helicopter Equipped Rescue Operation'. Although the more impressive skill of your main character is the apparent ability to fire laser beams from his eyes (or maybe it's meant to be gun). Either way you have to explore an underground mine blowing up walls with sticks of dynamite and getting bored very, very quickly.

That these games don't stand up today is hardly their fault, indeed from an academic perspective there is plenty to admire in terms of what they achieve using the pitifully limited technology of the day. None of that though has anything to do with wanting to spend £5 to play them on your mobile. Especially not given the questionable quality of the emulation and the ungenerous number of games included in the first place.

Activision Anthology

Three games from the very dawn of time that certainly didn't deserve the indignity of being woken from their undead slumber
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Roger  Hargreaves
Roger Hargreaves
After being picked last for PE one too many times, Roger vowed to eschew all physical activities and exist only as a being of pure intellect. However, the thought of a lifetime without video games inspired him to give up and create for himself a new robot body capable of wielding a joystick – as well as the keyboard necessary to write for both Pocket Gamer and Teletext's GameCentral.