The old Space Port arcade on the Ave was dimly lit and cavernous, noisy, and filthy. To enter it you had to fight your way through a gauntlet of skuzzy souls, many of them mumbling "bud, bud..." as you passed by. It was shady. It seemed dangerous. It was a parent's worst nightmare.

My first year of high school, unbeknownst to my parents, I spent an obscene amount of hours at Space Port, where I fed quarters into games like Paperboy, Tron, and Spy Hunter. It was my hideout from the monotony and occasional misery of school and home, a place where victory could be attained and failures relieved with a simple "continue." That year, the arcade owned me. It also owned my allowance.

Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play tries to be a Space Port for my PlayStation Portable. Each of the disc's games—from classics such as Joust and Mortal Kombat, to forgotten souls like Toobin' and Arch Rivals—received my change during that arcade year. Midway has been able to port 21 of their classic games—each of which required a crate to house during the first Bush administration—to a single disc, and that's impressive. Less impressive, however, is the gameplay, most of which suffers from miserable, often laughable, controls.

Some games in the mix—including Rampage, Joust, and Gauntlet—have made the transition relatively smoothly, but the majority, especially those that had complicated or wacky controls, quickly become more effort than they're worth. Spy Hunter was challenging when it was an upright; the PSP's button layout, small screen, and analog nub make things downright impossible. That goes doubly so for the skating game 720°, which relied on a combination of recklessness and absolute control of the joystick that the handheld simply can't match. Landing tricks while dodging packs of bees (it still doesn't make any sense) requires wrist action, not pecking thumbs, and it won't be long before you'll feel the urge to chuck your PSP across the room.

Thankfully, two of my all-time favorite games, Paperboy and Cyberball 2072, are bright spots, even if their graphics aren't as crisp as I remember. In a move missing from the rest of the games, the former's innovative handlebar controls have been spread intuitively across the PSP's controls, while the latter remains cool as shit, playing just as I recalled and nearly outmatching the current version of Madden in the gameplay department—despite being 20 years older.

Together those two games nearly earn the disc's retail markup. But when all the quarters have been dropped, Midway Arcade Treasures comes up short. Just because a game is old doesn't mean it doesn't deserve respect, and while porting the classics to Sony's handheld is a welcome gesture, not even the rosy hue of nostalgia can rescue this gaggle of games on the PSP. Midway rightly wants to celebrate its past; too bad, then, that they've done their games such a disservice in the present.