Quick Look: Atari Flashback Classics vol. 1

Nothing stops the Game Room Quicklook!

This isnt Arcade Archives!

I imported this one and part2 to europe, couldn't pass up on the glorious cover art.

Game Room 2016.

Needs more avatar T-posing.

Its on like an Atari Flasback with the two coolest cats in town

As someone who re-watches the Game Room (and other retro) Quicklooks probably one a month or so...damn you aren't kidding.

Eagerly awaiting/dreading the time when game publishers try to cash in on a library of crappy Intellivision games for current-gen consoles.

BRAD OPEN YOUR MOUTH BRAD. BRAD. SAY WORDS.

Brad is most likely talking about XboxAhoy's (Ahoy) A Brief History of Graphics on YouTube. Amazing YouTuber. You should look at all his weapon videos and especially his pieces on DOOM and Quake.

To my OCD crew: Brad notices they've been going in the "wrong" order about fifty minutes in.

Hate trackballs eh?

AVGN did a really good episode on the Swordquest games and what happened with them. There was a contest with awesome prizes and then problems happened.

The PC version is way better. Half price since they didn't split the games into 2 packs. Plus I think the menus are way nicer.

Whenever they do these re-releases I always scratch my head in disbelief when I see stuff NOBODY would ever want to play like Backgammon or Blackjack. Like who would WANT to play the 2800 version of Backgammon? There's probably a gazillion free ways of doing it wayyy better.

I don't know. It looks bad on the whole package.

Game Room Lives.

classic game collection quick looks are my favorite thing on the site

Game Room returns... kind of...

I feel like some collections do it better than others. As far as padding out the number of games by loading in crap, this collection is one of the worst offenders I've ever seen. And I foolishly bought both volumes on day one.

I wonder if there were sudden rises in epilepsy cases around the time of certain Atari games releases.

I'd like to see more collections from different publishers, a la the Rare collection. We always get Atari, Namco, and Midway.

I want to see The Acclaim Collection. Just a definitive stroll through the history of Acclaim, all culminating in the crown jewel: BMX XXX HD.

OH MY GOD COMBAT 1 IS RIGHT THERE WHY DOES NO ONE SEE IT????!!!!

Boy, some of these games did not capture well at all.

Oh wow, I never knew about the poison mushrooms in Centipede. I was more of a Millipede person. Love that DDT.

Fond memories of the Warlords cash games.

There are certainly some neat games in here but boy, 50% seems terrible to me.

I kinda knew what i was getting into and wanted a copy of breakout and adventure and knew im never gonna play "basketball"

I feel bad for someone who just sees FIFTY GAMES! though

the collection software itself is good though. the clarity is the best ive seen.

OLD

VIDEO

GAMES

@jeff you should totally check out the Sword Quest Championship scandal. Very interesting reading.

So many of my childhood experiences with 2600 and 5200 games were:

1. Turn game on
2. Be confused as things happened seemingly at random
3. Wonder what this game even is
4. Turn game off

The fifth step was usually play River Raid, or Combat. Combat fucking ruled.

Robotron was a very early dual joystick shooter, but Taito made an earlier example in 1981, "Space Dungeon". It seems inspired by Rogue, in that it has dungeon levels and rooms.

Pong....or DON'T!

wow how did the intellivision loose to the atari? Wow Boy did the intellivision have better looking and more complicated and fun games. Wow...... sigh.

It's a pity this is such a minimalist, no-frills package compared to say, Rare Replay. It's just a random grab-bag of games. These collections really benefit from those little extras.

Being from the UK this is like that package was for the Americans in that a lot of the console stuff is completely unfamiliar to me in the same way Rare's computer games (many of which were influential classics here) were to them. Without that nostalgic context, they don't stand up of course

These are my dollars other bugs, fXXk XFF, my dollars!!! pew pew

@zaldar: They talk about it a bit on the Game Room QuickLooks, but the gust of it is that most of the game coders and designers gravitated to Atari. Intellivision had a bit more muscle, but its game library was limited and uninspired.

Also the Intellivision controller was complete poop. It was like holding a telephone receiver in your hands. :b

The glow on those games kept making me feel like I had to take my glasses off and clean them.

Never seen the vector stuff, i think it really holds up compared to that early pixel stuff.

Atari 2600 sounds are so good. I can't get enough of them.

@m3cha: Agreed. When I stumbled upon his stuff I binge-watched the shit out of it in one big hit.

EDIT: I was 5 when Tempest came out. Also, TANK PONG 4 LYF

Tempest is lookin' good.

In the future, the only game will be QUADRUN.

Man, I love Lunar Lander.

Not 24 hours ago I watched the Game Room QL that covered 3D Tic Tac Toe. Nice (?) to see it back.

There's no terminal velocity on the moon, Brad. Terminal velocity is based on wind resistance, and the moon has no atmosphere.

I remember liking Haunted House as well Brad.

@zaldar: Besides what @dasakamov wrote, there was also the timing aspect. The Intellivision was released three years after the VCS, and was soon followed by the ColecoVision, which was demonstrably more advanced. Then the '83/'84 crash killed them all.

Pretty cool until you started on the 2600 games, then it was all downhill. :\

Even here in the Americas (I'm Canadian), very few of the games on these two collections have all that much nostalgia or historical context behind them.

As for the ones that do, I obviously grew up with them, so I'm not sure how to communicate that context to someone who didn't, but the most successful Atari games were very simple, intuitive, and fun to play in short bursts.