What can be said about Midway Arcade Treasures that hasn't already been said? Midway has capitalized on their vast library of arcade classics and have extended their reach to all three of the current generation of consoles (PS2, Xbox, GameCube) and the Sony PSP. The latest frontier for Arcade Treasures is on the PC in
Midway Arcade Treasures: Deluxe Edition.

With the late addition of the original
Mortal Kombat, the first three arcade
Mortal Kombat games along with the entire catalog of the previous
Midway Arcade Treasures 2 and
Midway Arcade Treasures 3 are featured in the 4 disc compilation.
Deluxe Edition comes with 2 discs to install for
Midway Arcade Treasures 2 and 2 discs for
Midway Arcade Treasures 3. As with all recent Midway PC games,
Midway Arcade Treasures Deluxe Edition contains a controversial
Star Force copy protection software program. Just type "starforce" into
Google and you'll see many webpages dedicated to the issues people have with this Star Force protection. The first annoyance this copy protection causes is a mandatory reboot of the system in order to play any of the games after installing them, unless you have already installed a game previously with
Star Force protection.

If you have previously purchased
Midway Arcade Treasures 2, then you have seen everything there is to see here. Both
Mortal Kombat II and
Mortal Kombat 3 are
exactly the same games seen on the consoles, quirks and all. All of the terrible oversights are present, such as flickering and disappearing shadows and the poorly mapped pause and start functions on the same button resulting in no hidden
Smoke battle and no
Random Select. Unfortunately, instead of fixing these problems plaguing the console release of these games, the developers have introduced a new serious flaw that affects ALL games in the
Midway Arcade Treasures 2 compilation. Every game's music is non-existant. Not a single background music song is heard in any of the games on
Midway Arcade Treasures 2. The console version of the arcade
Mortal Kombat 3 had some big problems with the music and it seems like the baby might have been thrown out with the bath water in this instance. This is an inexcusable omission that cannot be overlooked as the games feel soulless without their background tracks.

It seems like we've already received the best ever version of
Mortal Kombat II and
Mortal Kombat 3 on the PC back in 1996. It is unfortunate that
Midway continuously overlooks these issues, which are completely unacceptable for die-hard fans of the original
Mortal Kombat games. One would think that even the novice
Mortal Kombat fan would have noticed all of these issues and have had them addressed, especially when the same issues plagued the console versions released well over a year ago.
For even the biggest
Mortal Kombat fan,
Midway Arcade Treasures: Deluxe Edition is a major letdown. Without any music tracks and all of the same flaws from the console versions, hit the run button on this one.