Midway Arcade Origins available today on PS3 and 360

With Midway Arcade Origins, a collection of arcade favorites available today on PS3 and 360, developer Backbone Entertainment wanted to offer an experience that was faithful to the 31 original arcade games on the disc, according to the PlayStation Blog.

Midway Arcade Origins producer Jeremy Mahler said that Backbone wanted to ensure it "paid proper homage to the collection's arcade roots," so the main menu sports a model of each game's arcade cabinet as well as its marquee. These are straight ports — "each game looks and plays exactly the same as its arcade counterpart," said Mahler — and many of them are more faithful to the original games than ever before, thanks to "true sound emulation for the first time on a console." Midway Arcade Origins does offer a visual filter to make the games look "smoother" and "more modern," but it's optional.

Arcade games focused on high scores, so Midway Arcade Origins includes online leaderboards; the toughest challenge comes from the Score Attack mode, which tasks players with completing games on a single credit with the default settings. (PlayStation Network Trophies and Xbox Live Achievements can only be unlocked in Score Attack.) Players also have the option of a Free Play mode, which allows them to customize options such as number of lives per credit, difficulty and time, depending on the game. Trivia on the pause screen offers some factoids about each game's history, too.

Midway Arcade Origins is now available on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 for $29.99.