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As someone who didn't grow up with any of the Llamasoft games, I wasn't really aware of Jeff Minter until maybe around the time of Space Giraffe getting released on XBLA. I had heard of Tempest 2000, but it just wasn't something I had really grown up around.
And then I finally played TxK, Minter's attempt to make a new Tempest game without Atari, and I fell in love. I've always loved the sort of Vectrek style of using lines against black bacgrounds, and the sounds and effects made it feel like a real "arcade" experience.
Since TxK, I've tried to play as many of Minter's games as I can get my hands on, but that can be tricky with not all of them having been designed for modern controllers/hardware. This collection brings together a ton of those games and gives them an updated control interface so you can play them with a controller.
But there's so much more. The team at Digital Eclipse has included footage of interviews with Jeff from the documentary Heart of Neon, a film about Llamasoft's history. It's not the complete film, mind you, but the stuff they've included is really interesting and gives a much clearer picture of Jeff as a person.
As with the Atari 50 Anniversary Collection, there is also an absolute buttload of additional content that shows off the devices these games were created on, notebooks and photos of development information, fully 3D rendered box art, and a ton more. It's a package that's bursting at the seems for anyone who has interest in these legendary games.
There is one somewhat small thing, however, that I wish there was an easier way to get around. When you look at the timeline of all the games included, you notice that there's basically nothing included from around the early/mid 90's until you get to the modern, re-imagined version of Gridrunner. Jeff was making games at this time (and still continues to), but there is a distinct lack of those games. It makes sense for some of them, as they're still being sold separately (the Minotaur Collection and Polybius come to mind) but then there are ones like Gridrunner++, the games he produced for the iOS, or even stuff like Tempest 3000 (a DVD player game) that aren't in this collection, but you do see some of them in documentary footage. It left me really wanting to check them out, but with them not being included here, it will be way more difficult.
Even with that aside, this collection is still incredible. Whether you grew up with these games or are just getting to experience them for the first time, this whole package is packed with all kinds of arcade-style game goodness. Not needing to download weird emulators and program stuff to a controller is definitely a plus, but I'm mostly just glad to get all of this in one place. A fantastic collection and I hope Digital Eclipse gets to keep doing more and more stuff like this. They are so incredibly talented at this, and you really feel the love they want to share with these collections.