I got my hands on some extra money so I’ve been spending like a sailor on shore leave–new socks, brand name soda, the works. The latest waste has been on two all-in-one revivals of classic video games, the Intellivision 25 and Atari 10-in-1 that plug right into your TV and don’t need any cartridges.
Each unit has its weaknesses. The main weakness in both is that my kids and other moderns are hardpressed to recognize these as video games. “Where are the 65,000,000 colors and the 5.1 surround sound?” “But it’s all gameplay, dear. Art doesn’t need to be complex to be great.” The crude look and sound didn’t seem to prevent them from playing for about two hours, either.
The reset buttons, especially on the Atari, could be harder to hit accidentally. It’s cool how they fit the whole game in a package almost identical to an old joystick but the designers could have made the Atari joystick a little less identical to the original in feel (none), speed (little), and accuracy (vague). The Intellivision controller, on the other hand, feels and works great while looking nothing like the dogs the original used.
The Atari has the edge in recognizable games, including Asteroids and Centipede. I wasn’t all that familiar with Intellivision’s game before buying this but that nice controller makes familiarizing myself with new games worthwhile. Some are quite nice considering they originally fit into a four- or eight-kilobyte ROM.
I got the Atari at Toys-R-Us for $20 (don’t be a dope paying more for the same thing on eBay), telling the cashier I’m stuck in the 80s. “There are a lot of people who are. We’ve sold out of these a couple times.” The Intellivision came from Bed Bath and Beyond, where I had a $5 coupon so it was only $15. Both were fabulous bargains compared with the originals. Can you believe people actually paid forty 1980 dollars for these carts? I didn’t then and won’t now but I am happy to toss those guys considerably less. And the Intellivision crowd is even many of the same original developers!
I too love older video games. Although I’ve never played games as old as Intellivison or Atari games (I mean for the Atari 2600- I’ve probably played some of the games the company is making now), I love my NES and SNES emulators. In fact, right now I’m playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on ZSNES!
Other older games that I love include:
Super Metroid
Metroid (the origional NES one)
Super Mario Bros.
The Legend of Zelda
Zelda II
Contra (NES, although I really suck at it)
Donkey Kong Country
Super Mario Kart
Starfox (SNES version, although I also like Starfox 64)
The game selection for the Atari one is odd (Circus Atari, Breakout and Pong were paddle games… it’s a joystick!), and some of the games look strange.
Jakks Pacific sells a similar gizmo with 10 Activision games (Atlantis was an Imagic title) in a gamepad. They also sell an arcade style stick with 5 Namco (Bally/Midway in the US) titles.
The Intellivision unit has some probs. Duplicating the Inty in hardware is difficult (a little used 16-bit processor and 10, yes 10, bit ROMs).
Turns out the hardware for this unit is based on that used in pirate NES machines. The games were all redone, some not too well. This comes from usenet posts from a guy who took his apart.
Does the Atari joystick break as easily as the original ones did?
Man, my brother and I really worked those sticks – and once that white plastic piece inside snapped, it was time to pester Dad to plonk down another $30…
The controls are different, naturally – and just plain difficult on some of the games, particularly Kaboom!, I want the old paddle thingy dangit! – but I have a PS1 30-game collection. Lots of fun, though I haven’t devoted hours to it – I think a lot of the beauty of these games is that you can spend anywhere from five minutes up playing them. They’re great if I’ve only got a few minutes but am itching to play something.
It irritated my mom when I could jump on the crocodile heads in Pitfall when I was six. It REALLY irritates her now because I still can.
Does anyone remember dragonfire for atari? I think that was the name. It consisted of controlling a little night, or thief, you had to jump fireballs as you crossed a bridge and then once inside avoid the dragon whilst looting the booty…I’d love to paly that again…
One classic game that I can play for hours is a good version of Q-Bert. The version I had was for the Commodore 64 and it was identical to the version seen in arcades. Whenever I happen across the arcade I can play for half an hour on one quarter.
These ones seem to have (relatively) more recent games. Seems like at least some of them are NES roms. Too bad Nintendo doesn’t release their own official, all-in-the-controller version of the old 8-bit NES.
I have found a place that will sell me an old arcade cabinet for 80 bucks (generic, relax purists!) and then I am going to build my own arcade machine. Many of the companies are now selling the ROMS for their classic games, so I am going to build a mean MAME machine Going to start as soon as I have moved to my new appartment where I am going to have my very own workroom.
Man, you guys would absolutely love Disney Quest in Orlando. It’s a not-too-often visited building that houses more arcade games (old and new) you can shake a stick at. You pay a flat fee, walk in, and play all the games you want: no quarters involved. Great place for us pesky, meddling kids born in the 80’s who didn’t get a shot at these games the first time around.
Ah Dragonfire. I played it last night. No fooling. I found our Intellivision in the basement and have been playing whenever I make it home on the weekends. The semester is over soon, so I know that I’ll become lazy again and tell myself I’ll beat Burgertime and Pitfall, but I’m convinced that there is no ending to Pitfall. Good times!! We have roughly 30 games and it’s funny to see that the games were from 1982 and 1983. Man how times have changed. Go from playing Intellivision to PS2 and it is a BIG change. But fun nonetheless.
But I can’t imagine that this pack will appeal to anyone except for nostalgia value, and 99% of the nostalgia from the Atari 2600 is those god-awful joysticks. (The other 1% is from the faux wood-grain finish.) We wore those monstrous thumb-callouses with pride. I’m skeptical about the claims of “superior gameplay”, though, since even the simplest of Java apps nowadays can outperform anything on the 2600.
I’m surprised to hear that the pack includes so many paddle games, though – almost makes you think they’d make two versions, one with a paddle and one with a joystick.
And speaking of the faux wood-grain finish, somebody online made a portable version of the 2600 a while back; it ended up being a good bit larger than an original Gamebody and could accept the original 2600-sized cartridges. My favorite part of the project was that they used that plastic “wood” all over the case.
Ah, damn it, if there’s one thing that sucks about Australia it’s the lack of retro gaming shops (not to mention the crappiness of the non-retro gaming distributions, but let’s not go there). I mean, Earthbound didn’t even come out here. Okay, probably at this point nobody knows what I’m talking about.
Anyway, at least my computer is regionless. I finished level sixteen of Doom II from scratch today (on UV, of course). Been trying to do that for ages.
By the way, most things pre-SNES are before my time, although there are some notable exceptions (Kirby’s Adventure, anyone?). However, my proudest retro possession is a Nintendo game-and-watch of Fire (I have Octopus somewhere, too), which was copyrighted no less than four years before I was born (1981). Hell yeah.
Somewhere I have the Atari 7800 game Larry Bird vs. Dr. J, the very first EA Sports game. It was great. You could even shatter the backboard, and a janitor would sweep it up and grumble at you. I wonder what that would fetch on eBay.
Going to start as soon as I have moved to my new appartment where I am going to have my very own workroom.