If you want to kick it OLD old school, this is likely the game for you.
Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 (DS)
[starreview]
Developer: Atari/Code Mystics
Release Date: November 2nd, 2010
ESRB: E
Holy cow, video games are old. If you remember when Pong came out, you’re at least forty years old, because that came out in 1972. And that is the oldness of the old-school that you’ll be getting with Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1. Nine classic arcade games join up with 41 old-school Atari 2600 titles in this package. If you owned an Atari way back in the days of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, this is a package full of highly faithful ports of many games you might have had, and they’re generally fun titles. And really, this is a game aimed entirely at people who have played these games before. If your first console was a NES or later, you’re going to be surprised at some of these included games, namely most of them.
The package itself is quite well made. It’s an ironically retro package, using colors, shapes and fonts you might find in the 1970′s. Every game is perfectly preserved; the Atari 2600 titles have all the game selects and difficulty switches that would be on your original machine, and you can even choose to play on an old-school black-and-white screen. The arcade games are also faithfully preserved, and most of them offer you multiple control options, including a few with touch screen abilities. The audio, simple as it is, is highly retro and fun.
In addition to the games themselves, Atari’s gone the extra mile to make this a collector’s package. Every Atari 2600 game has a fully reproduced manual included under the Extras menu; the color pages are reprinted right on your screen for you to look at and reference. Arcade games, similarly, have cabinet art and stickers and other such things provided, for fun. There’s even a trivia game for people who want to test their Atari knowledge, and an old prototype Battlezone title that the United States Army commissioned Atari for the purpose of training their troops; how well it worked to that end is anyone’s guess. The point is, this is a really good package for these titles.
So in the end, it all comes down to the titles. The arcade games include classics like Asteroids, Centipede, Pong, Missile Command and the highly addictive Tempest, while the Atari 2600 games include Atari Video Cube, Adventure, Haunted House, Surround, Outlaw, a number of sports games, and three of the Swordquest titles. If you know these titles, and played them back in the day and loved them, then you’ll probably enjoy this collection for the nostalgia factor. If you’re not used to games from this era, though, it’s… a different story, to say the least.
The thing is, Atari games are really, really old. I knew that going in, but I was absolutely blown away by some of these. If you decide to play Championship Soccer, you end up controlling three dots on a green screen, all moving together in lock and step in a triangle. And here’s a quick comparison for you: on the left is the aptly-named adventure game Adventure, from 1979, contrasted with The Legend of Zelda, released on the Japanese FDS in 1986.
See that green dot on the left? That’s you.
I’m not saying that the games are terrible because they’re graphically inferior. I am trying to illustrate, however, that the Atari just wasn’t as capable as any game system created on the last 25 years, and it mainly shows in terms of the simple game mechanics and the bugs that crop up every now and again. Reading the manuals for a couple of these games, there are warnings about things like getting stuck in walls and being forced to reset – seemingly easy-to-fix bugs that the Atari 2600 simply wasn’t capable of dealing with.
Simple games can be fun, and there are a couple of games in this package that got me completely hooked for a little bit, like the arcade version of Tempest, and the Atari Video Cube. But there are some cases where the game is simple because it’s perfected its game mechanic, and some cases (notably the Swordquest games) where the game is so simple it wraps around and becomes highly difficult and confusing again. There are some things that the Atari can excel at, and then there are some things that it tried to do, but failed. At the end of the day, though, the Atari 2600 is technologically outclassed by free Flash games on the Internet, which is unfortunate.
If you pick up this package, you should do so because you really want to play old Atari games specifically. Most of the games available in this package have been made better over the past thirty years, and you could find comparable or better experiences in many different places; there’s no reason to want to play the Swordquest games in this package when you can get the spectacular Link to the Past on the Virtual Console for $8. These titles really do not stand the test of time.
If, however, you want to get your hands on some old-school Atari games, either out of nostalgia or curiosity, this is as excellent and faithful a translation as you’re going to get. You’re going to get the complete Atari experience, for better or worse, and will want for nothing, save a joystick. And maybe that Swordquest comic I read so much about. Just make sure that you really want to enjoy these games again, before you buy.
