Atari Flashback 2+

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Atari Flashback 2+

Written by Quebus

Wednesday, 02 June 2010 08:12

A few weeks back Mortley was out shopping at one of the warehouse membership stores in town and saw the Atari Flashback 2+. Given we spent a good deal of our youth in front of an Atari 2600 and given also the low price point of this retro console (roughly $40), he picked one up for the hell of it and dropped it off here for me to give it the once over.

I glanced at the list of ROM-based titles (this is a self-contained unit that has 40ish games onboard) and thought that this might be a fun way to illustrate an important point with my kids – “good graphics” is not a synonym for “good game”.

From a console perspective, they’ve done a pretty good job with this. It’s roughly 2/3rds the size of the original but has the vibe right. A few buttons have been moved and redesigned (gone is the “plunger” reset switch and small “difficulty” switches on the back) largely for the better. The joysticks seem robust enough and replicate the feel (and frustration) of the originals.

Turning the console on, you get a spartan menu that you navigate with a joystick and the titles are sorted loosely into genres. You scroll down within a genre and “fire” to select a game from a list – intuitive to the point of being self explanatory.

After sampling a few titles, I can report that gameplay is a bit spotty (at least on the combination of console and TV we have, a 40” Samsung LCD). Adventure was a huge personal favourite of mine back in the day and it’s a title they nailed exactly right according to my memory banks. Switching to Asteroids, we had some trouble. It seemed that our ship was invisible, making the task of staying out of the path of the asteroids even more challenging than usual. Admittedly, I didn’t troubleshoot this on another TV so I couldn’t say whether it was a bug or a rendering issue.

Considering the price point, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to really beat up on the Atari Flashback 2+ but it bears mentioning a number of points that render it more of a qualified success than a true hit (although I understand it has sold pretty well).

As one of the earliest examples of a “de facto” standard in gaming platforms, the Atari 2600 had a ton of titles and benefitted from ports of many of the best contemporary arcade games at the time. It also drew new game development from some of the best 3^rd party developers at the time (eg. Activision). I’m sure an Atari historian or enthusiast could set me straight but from my semi-layman’s perspective, it was these arcade ports and 3^rd party games that really represented the best of the Atari 2600. Back in the day, the system shipped with Combat but my recollection is that I didn’t spend a ton of time playing the 276 variations of “tank pong” on that cartridge very long. The Atari 2600 Flashback 2+ suffers from "some killer and a lot of filler” in my opinion. Some of the filler even resorts to homebrew games and “previously unreleased prototypes”. I’m sure this is titillating for the people who make annual sojourns to Atari conventions but for the rest of us? Not so much.

In doing a bit of reading it seems that the previous version (Flashback 2) actually had Pitfall and River Run from Activision but they were removed for this release. From my vantage point, this makes the “Flashback 2+” more of a minus. A "best of of the Atari 2600" needs to include the best.

Once again, with the caveat “for the price”, this thing should have had a cartridge slot. Apparently it can be modded to play the original cartridges so why not include the feature? The carts are still out there and if you have any laying around, chances are they represent the titles you would be most motivated to nostalgia on if you were given the chance.

I opened this thing to play Adventure and Yar’s Revenge but where are Defender and Demon Attack? Where is Pac Man for crying out loud? I’m sure there are perfectly good business–oriented answers to these questions but from my perspective as a gamer, they really would have been further ahead to bump the price point up a bit and allow the system to support the original ROM cartridges. They’re on Ebay and in garage sales and who knows, maybe in your closet too. This would have made the Atari Flashback 2+ a true plus but instead, for the same $40ish dollars, you may scratch your retro itch more effectively by simply hunting down an original in decent playing condition.