Atari Flashback Classics, Volumes I and II

[mmcirvin]

 So I gave in and got these packs for the XBox One. They're $20 each, which translates to about $6.50 in 1980 dollars. If you'd told me back in the early 80s that for six and a half bucks I could have a big box of 41 Atari VCS/2600 cartridges AND playable conversions of nine top-notch arcade cabinets (and another completely different collection for another six and a half bucks), I'd have fainted. Even if I knew perfectly well that most of the cartridges weren't really very good ones.

But time marches on. Are they worth $20 each? Eh... mayyybe, if you're nostalgic in the exact way I am. You can easily get playable versions of most or all of these on your computer for free by not strictly legal means, but it's nice having them all legitimately on the XBox. I admit that much of the attraction of Volume II for me was just having a console version of Major Havoc, a surprisingly complex and difficult early platformer/shooter using Atari's Quadrascan color vector hardware. (neb6's YouTube video of Major Havoc below got a comment insisting that somebody had to be lying about the game being from 1983; they couldn't possibly have done that with the primitive technology of the time. It reminded me of ancient-astronaut theorists.)

"Major Havoc vector arcade game by Atari (1983)." (Watch on YouTube)

Some of these games are undone by the control scheme. Most of the paddle games like Pong and Breakout are just no good when played with a spring-centering XBox joystick. The Stella emulator actually does a lot better with these since it can use your computer's trackpad or mouse. Tempest... is actually playable, though it's definitely not as good as with the real rotary controller from the arcade machine. The arcade games made to be played with trackballs, like Missile Command and Atari Force: Liberator, work OK, but again they'd undoubtedly be better with the real thing.

On the other hand, the games with an Asteroids-style rotate-and-thrust scheme, like Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Space Duel and Gravitar, fare surprisingly well. You can use the D-pad if you need fine control, and it actually feels better than the arcade buttons to me. Major Havoc comes across just fine. And Black Widow, another Atari color vector game that probably helped inspire Geometry Wars, plays great on this system: I think modern game controllers are better for twin-stick shooters than just about anything else. (Similarly, Robotron: 2084 is the absolute best conversion on the Midway Arcade Origins disc. Or maybe I just love twin-stick shooters.)

A nice bonus for the 2600 shovelware is that there are scans of all the original manuals included, and they've bothered to include on-screen captions of what the game variations mean. (The early cartridges particularly liked to advertise that they had dozens of different numbered game variations, which were usually the same game with every possible combination of three or four binary gameplay tweaks, in one- and two-player versions. It could make flipping through them a little confusing without reference materials.)

These are basically all the 2600 games they could get that were (a) made by Atari, and (b) lacking in any encumbering external IP license. That means a lot of the best games are missing: no Space Invaders (that was a conversion of a Taito game), no Defender or Stargate (Williams), no Pole Position (Namco), no movie licenses, etc. But I have a weird morbid fascination born of ancient Sears Christmas Wish Books with the crude, blocky 4K games they put out in the late seventies (correction: I'd misremembered; these very earliest games are actually 2K ROMs!!), and they're all here, including the "Miniature Golf" cartridge in which everything is a rectangle, which I have found inexplicably addictive since I was a kid.

They also have the 2600 versions of Missile Command, Asteroids, Centipede and Millipede, but they're somewhat overshadowed by the arcade versions, which are also here. Except that the arcade Missile Command kicks my butt, and I got really good at the 2600 version several decades ago and can still play it for a good long time.

Comments

[mmcirvin]

There's a third volume which I am probably not going to get, since the arcade cabinets in that one are mostly sports games that are not interesting to me, and the home console cartridges get into Atari 5200 games, which I am not nostalgic about. Some of those were straight adaptations of Atari 400/800 games that I did have, but the only one I really have strong feelings about is Star Raiders, and that's probably not worth $20 all by itself. The 2600 port of Star Raiders is in Volume I, and the XBox controller has enough buttons to perform all of the functions that they needed a special keypad controller for in the original game.

Other highlights of the 2600 shovelware: Volume I has Bowling, the only Atari 2600 game ever to actually get my daughter hooked on it; Combat, the two-player-only tanks/planes game that was the original VCS pack-in cartridge, and that my mother was utterly lethal at around 1980; and Yar's Revenge, a bizarre, fugly game that looks like a programming accident, but is inexplicably actually really fun to play and was probably Atari's last big hit for the 2600.

Volume II, besides the 2600 conversions of most of its arcade games, also has Adventure, the game that taught a generation (and StrongBad) that dragons look like freaking ducks; Starship, a first-person space shooter in a 2K ROM from 1977 that is really quite terrible but impresses me for its pure audacity in existing; and the aforementioned 2600 Video Pinball.

Probably the single oddest thing on Volume II is Stellar Track, an attempt to adapt the text-based, unlicensed "Star Trek" games that were originally written for 1970s mainframes. That's weird in itself, but the other weird thing about it was that it was a Sears exclusive, sold as a game for their Sears-branded version of the 2600, the "Sears Video Arcade." It's pretty much unplayable but the sheer WTF factor makes it kind of interesting. Star Raiders was itself a much better attempt at adapting those Star Trek games, by making them real-time and grafting on a "3D" action game.

[mmcirvin]

(There were two other Sears-exclusive cartridges, Steeplechase and Submarine Commander, both of which are in these collections somewhere. They were all actually made by Atari for Sears. For many years I kept thinking Steeplechase was an Activision title, probably because I was confusing it with Stampede, but it's not. Submarine Commander is from 1982 but has unusually sophisticated visuals for a 2600 game, and I wonder if some of the code was re-used for the 2600 version of Battlezone, which isn't in these collections for some reason but looks a bit similar.)

[mmcirvin]

And, no, I have no idea why the developers of Major Havoc had it in for Digital Equipment Corporation ("the Vaxxian homeworld of Maynard"?)

[mmcirvin]

Aha--Atari used VAXen internally for cross-assembled development and company email, and they were perennially overloaded:

https://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/vmail.htm

[metahacker]

Tempting!

[mmcirvin]

And yet, I do feel as if the collections as a whole are just short of truly great, for reasons they may have had no control over. The physical Flashback consoles have some of the licensed games that are missing here, for instance, and that's probably some convoluted IP issue (I think some of those other Atari games might be offered as extras in other XBox Live offerings associated with the license).

And the control adaptation issues on some of the games are vexing, sometimes in ways that could have been fixed--I haven't dug very deep into the options menus here and it's possible that in some cases the settings may be adjustable in ways that make the game more playable.

This seems to be a problem with many of these commercial arcade emulation collections: the Midway collection I mentioned (which actually has a bunch of Williams and Atari arcade games as well--it's an XBox 360 release, playable on the One through backward compatibility) has some glitches in mapping Defender's oddball control scheme to the XBox controller, though, strangely, it does better with Stargate even though that's basically the same.

Another thing that bothered me with Flashback is that the default sound volume settings are VERY LOUD even by XBox videogame standards. But this is adjustable.