Retro gaming packages are usually hit-or-miss affairs. The worst ones are hastily slapped together collections of titles that no one would pay a dime for individually, put out by lazy publishers with more intellectual property than imagination. The best ones celebrate the history of gaming and do everything in their power to recreate not only the games themselves, but a sense of why they were cool in the first place. Fortunately for PSP-owning classic-gaming fans, Activision Hits Remixed falls firmly in the latter camp and might just be the greatest compilation of classic games ever released.

These are some of the first games I ever played, so nostalgia has almost certainly tinted my glasses a rosy hue when it comes to evaluating them. But fond childhood memories aside, it's commonly accepted that Activision titles like Pitfall, Chopper Command, River Raid and Keystone Capers were among the best titles you could buy for the Atari 2600. Of course, by today's standards, almost nothing that you could play on the 2600 approaches the complexity of even the simplest web games, so the charm of these relics might be lost on gamers lucky enough to have had the NES, Genesis or PlayStation as their first console. And to you, I say: Get off my lawn.


The 44 games in Activision Hits Remixed range from classic (Pitfall) to godawful (Dragster), but each is good for at least a few minutes of entertainment, especially if you play against a friend. Thanks to the PSP's Game Share functionality, two players can play across an Ad Hoc network with only one copy of the game. You can choose to play the games in their original aspect ratios or stretch them to fill the screen, and as far as my rapidly failing memory can recall, these are pixel-perfect recreations running on a flawless emulator. Playing Kaboom! for the first time in two decades brought back a flood of first-grade memories, although it was also kind of depressing to realize that, despite all the gaming I've done in the last twenty years, I still suck at Kaboom!

But wait! There's more! Each game has variable difficulty levels and other customization options, mapped to the R and L buttons. Pressing the Circle button backs you out of the game and returns you to the main menu, but it also pauses the game at the exact moment you left it. You can return to it later and pick up where you left off, and if you save your game, you can still resume at the exact same point, even after powering down the PSP. Old-timers who took Pitfall to its 20-minute limit back in the day would have killed for this functionality. Activision Hits Remixed might also be the only PSP game in existence with absolutely no load times whatsoever, as all 44 games are saved in memory simultaneously.