Tron

The Good
Tron features four games based on the Disney movie, and each is a fine tribute to the source material and fun and interesting games to boot. There's even a grid-bugs scene, something left out of the final movie. The play is nice and tight, and accompanied by an excellent stereo audio soundtrack.

The Bad
Just four twitch games, and they keep repeating. Expected for a game of the era, but has your interest waning quickly. The game is also feels strangely sterile, lacking any real humanity or emotion. I guess that's appropos for a game dealing with the inner-life of cold circuitry, but that doesn't make for a connection with the gamer.

The Bottom Line
One of the great arcade games. Something is lost when you don't have the excellent presentation of the actual arcade cabinet: that excellent flight stick, everything bathed in black-light, the great aural sensation. But, the games are fun to play in their own right.

The Good
Tron is the first major movie-to-game (game-to-movie-to-game?) that actually had some relevance between its source material and translating some of the more exciting elements into a coherent gaming experience.

Tron brought the light cycles, and disc throwing excitement that offered multiple gameplay experiences in one title, as well as a fantastic soundtrack of the main musical theme. Even today, it's still catchy and recognizable (and surprisingly long).

After 26 years (outside of the Tron 2.0 bonus for the Game Boy Advance), the game comes home. It looks the part, keeps the four main games, and offers some fairly challenging achievements to rack up in the XBLA rendition. It also offers online play, if that's your sort of thing.

Tron the arcade game was a milestone in classic gaming, and finally some gamers are getting their first look at such a unique and brilliant title.

The Bad
There are two glaring flaws with this port, however. And it's two flaws which damage the game enough to not be the "arcade comes home" experience many people would hope it could have been.

The main problem is the controls, which is more than likely why this game was never attempted to bring home until now. Perhaps we should have kept waiting.

Tron's arcade set-up was a flight-stick with a trigger to move and shoot, and a rotating knob that controlled the tank turret and Tron's firing arm. No controller set-up has come close to matching how this worked, and its absence makes one understand why the original set-up was so vital to the game: The game can be emulated. The controls needed to play, can not. Tron's arm is staggeringly slow and imprecise, making for some stupid death moments. The directional capability is better, but stick to the directional pad, not the analog stick.

The music and sound effects are garbled and distorted, and actually painful to the years. So sound technology from 26 years ago is still difficult to emulate? Couldn't a remastering of the soundtrack be possible? Apparently not, and the end result is like fingernails on a chalkboard: Grating and unpleasant.

Ironically, the "Enhanced graphics" mode addresses and fixes the sound issue, and it sounds fine there. It raises the question of why this couldn't have been done for the original version.

There are other gripes: Online play isn't competitive. It's like taking turns for scoring points, and fairly useless. Players can also not implement their initials into the high score screen. While Leaderboards resolve the overall score posting issue, it's lazy porting to present the original high score screen in a game that you can't even use.

The Bottom Line
Tron is a wonderful, challenging and fun arcade classic. This port is a sloppy hand me down that Disney should have been ashamed of themselves to release in such a state, or at least, not patch the issues at this point. It's like greeting the prettiest and sweetest girl you've ever seen, and dousing her in mud, though there was no reason to do so, and it can't be explained why such a thing would happen.

Correcting the sound issues and controller sensitivity would go a long way in improving the quality of this title, or implementing a 2-player Vs. mode with the light cycles, which would have made perfect sense.

I can't totally say "avoid it" as it's still playable (if a little frustrating in its current state), but it's criminal to let such a great and almost never re-released game get such a lazy treatment on its first stand-alone "huzzah" on the console front.

Maybe in another 26 years, we'll get another go at giving a great game a better welcoming reception.