People who are looking for accurate nostalgia fix need not apply...

For those of us who lived through the dawn of video games (late 70s – early 80s), the Atari 2600 gaming console was a staple in most of our homes. The games, at the time, were “state-of-the-art”, not to mention, fun. Have games improved in the last 20 years? In graphics, yes, but as for gameplay…. Some of these have never been equaled for their addictiveness . Like a complete idiot (20/20 hindsight, I guess), I sold mine but retained the cartridges for my Colecovision Expansion (which stopped working).

After listening to me lament the passing of my vintage Atari 2600 gaming console, my wife purchased one of these for an early Christmas present ($40). The box claims that original versions of some twenty 2600 and 7800 games are included (there are no cartridges, the game ROMs are hardwired). Initially, I was ecstatic when I opened it and hooked it up. I had told my wife how fun some of the games were, and was looking forward to playing them with her. Several of the games on the console I was very familiar with, having spent hours on end in front of them, so when something was not right, the alarms in the back of my head went off immediately.

The first game I tried was 'Adventure' (a fantasy game set in a kingdom complete with dragons and an extremely irritating bat), and those alarms were sounding from the start. The ROM image is a pale imitation of the actual game, and is buggy too boot. For example, the game retains no memory between screens (i.e. a dragon cannot follow you between screens, and the bat also disappears when it goes off-screen - it is not on the next one). Also, while the colored keys can be used to open castle gates, it cannot lock them. I verified both of these (just in case my memory is shot) on a friend's 2600 console (yes, there are some working ones out there still).

As for the other games, I am only familiar with 'Yar's Revenge' (a futuristic action shoot-em-up, as my wife would say), and the responsiveness was very hit-and-miss (no pun intended). Many times, I had to hit the side button on the controller multiple times before it would register. I suspect that this was more a hardware issue than a software one, however. The controllers, and console itself, is extremely cheap, as to be expected by a company trying to pull itself back from the dead (the Activision guys are laughing their keisters off right now). The only thing that carried over somewhat faithfully is the sound (while it’s not exactly EAX surround, for the time it was OK).

My advice to anyone thinking about buying one of these is DON'T! You would do much better by going to E-Bay and finding the real thing. Another route, if you legally own the cartridges, might be emulators... but this thing is the biggest piece of junk I have seen in a long time. Don't waste your time if you want a true nostalgic Atari fix. This game is only suitable for children who don’t know any different (but all these kids did not grow up with them, and are used to what we have today).

P.S. I went through several of these units, hoping it to be an isolated issue, and each had the same issues. Also, the store where we bought it had a boatload of returns from other nostalgia mongers like myself.