Somewhere in a box at my Mom’s house is the Colecovision that I adored as a child.
In my colecovision career, I had the following:
Donkey Kong
Zaxxon
Cosmic Avenger
Defender
The Smurfs
Popeye
I honestly cannot pick a favorite, as I played them all so much that the only reason I switched one cartrige for another was sheer boredome.
I fondly recall the buggy behavior when the console got too hot, and how you had to have the “magic” touch with the reset button if you wanted to coax the game out of it’s coma. Ah the good old days…
i was too young to properly appreciate the colecovision properly first time round (my elder sister had one), but i picked one up at a jumble sale recently and was surprised at how much i remembered and how warm and fuzzy it made me feel playing on it again.
I did have an Atari, but i soon lost interest when i discovered the Amiga.
At a local computer game store, I saw a packaged classic Atari 2600 controller - and apparently it was set up such that if you hooked it up to a TV, inside the base of the controller was the ‘OS’ for the game machine and 10 pre-loaded classic games! Pity there’s no way to add more, but that looked like a great and inexpensive shot of nostalgia.
Ferret, I bought one of those for my dad at Christmas. For years he had been telling me that he missed my Atari 2600 that I had as a kid. He had one favorite game (Atlantis) that he became so good at that at one point I hid the game from him because he would play the same game for hours and I couldn’t get my turn. He really enjoys playing Atlantis again with that controller. It has several other games, I can’t remember all of them but Pitfall was one that was pretty cool. It is a pretty cheap way to get a little nostagia fill as you suggested.
I really loved my Colecovision and I can remember that my absolute favorite game was Miner 2049er followed closely by Donkey Kong. I wish I still had it but I do have Nintendo 64 and my current favorite game was a flea market find for $2.00. Namco Museum has Pac-Man, Ms Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Galaga among others. What a deal! Well… then again… If I had all those quarters that I spent in the 80’s back…
I have a working Atari 2600 (Actually, a Sears Telegames™ which is the same thing…) and at least 30-40 game cartridges. I take it out and play Pitfall every couple of years, but if anyone wants to make an offer on the some of the other games, send me your email and I’ll make a list.
Or take two steps up the first intact ladder in Donkey Kong, back down, take one step back, and then jump forward. A freak wormhole takes you to the top.
My favourite games tended to be the third party carts, like Epyx’s racing game-- I forget the title, but it had a 3D-ish look and a pitstop. And the Chuck Norris Karate game… And Miner 2049’er. And Sewer Sam! And Antarctic Adventure! Wheeee!
Star Raiders came with the keypad controller, right? That was nifty, back when.
[Hijack]
There were either four or five games that came with an Atari Force mini-comic book. I’m pretty sure Raiders was one of them, but I can’t recall the rest, and my own mini-comics are packed away at the moment. Anyone remember what the games were?
And I can recall discovering that DC put out an Atari Force comic, picking up the storyline from the earlier series, years later. Got all of them, packed away, too, someplace.
[/Hijack]
ET? I was the only one in my crowd who could actually beat the damn thing, and get the little rubber geek back home. After he leaves, the grand finale of the game is Elliot walking back and forth through his “house” tallying up your score. You got more points for giving the Reese’s Pieces to him, instead of eating them yourself.
The Magic Dot, in Adventure. The very first video game “easter egg” I ever saw, I think. Geeky good fun!
And let us not foget the Intellivision, complete with Voice Module. Despite the Colecovision’s better graphics, I always thought the Intellivision had the best games.
[sub]Bee-Seventeen Bowmer! That was not the tar-gait![/sub]
The only Atari gear I collect is their completely awesome music controlled pattern generator. I find them for $10.[sup]00[/sup] in the thrift shops. I have about five of them. They produce these really cool Navajo-rug style video color patterns in time to your stereo’s music.
Anyone else ever see one of these? In attempting to repair one of them, I opened it up only to find that I had worked for the company that built the silicon ICs inside. American Microsystems Inc. was one of the biggest chip contractors for Atari. This also helped lead to their demise. I have copies of an advanced three chip WWII game card that was never introduced on the market.
BTW, the game chips were produced for around a dollar. The chip was die attached directly to the small PCB and then “blob sealed” with a dallop of black epoxy after the wire bonding. The profits on these things were enormous.
As I write this, I am looking in the closet four feet away and I see some containers which hold 93 Atari 2600 cartridges, the console, the adapters, and a plastic bag full of controllers.
There are the joysticks, ruined from game after game of Decathalon.
There are the circular pads (what did they call them, again?) ruined from game after game of Kaboom!, Canyon Bomber, and (I’m ashamed to admit it) Blackjack.
There is one single keypad, ruined from nonstop games of Star Raiders.
And there is now an immeasurable amount of nostalgia. If I only had working controllers . . .
