Following our review of the Evercade’s Namco Museum Collection 1 we’re diving back into the retro themed handheld’s library with The Atari Collection 1.
This happy little cartridge features an impressive collection of 20 games including this cart’s big hitters Centipede, Asteroids, Adventure, Tempest and Missile Command.
One thing I didn’t mention in the last review was that each Evercade game comes in a small plastic box, and in what is a rarity in modern games, it comes with an instruction booklet. The instruction booklets are full colour and feature the controls as well as a short piece of information about how to play each game. The booklets don’t feature anywhere near as much about each game as the original releases of each game would have back in the day, but they are nicely presented and functional.
Back to the cartridge the first game to look at is Adventure. For those of you who are interested in playing through historical video games you can see the roots of games such as the Legend of Zelda in Adventure. In the game you play as a square…or at least it is a square that represents the player, and you move through a maze of screens much like in the Legend of Zelda, and you can pick up objects such as keys and swords which you use to aid you to progress through the game.
There’s a few dragons and a pesky bat which hinder your progress, but the good news is that they’re easily dispatched with the sword. The game is all about learning the route through and can be completed in a minutes, but for added reply value you can choose between three difficulty levels.
From Adventure to Aquaventure where you play as a scuba diver who swims around and shoots harpoons at fish. The fish come at you in various speeds and you collect occasional items and meet up with mermaids to complete levels all whilst battling against the clock as your oxygen quickly runs out.
The animation of the scuba diver is impressive as they continue paddle their feet, but the rest of this is fairly simple graphics that was true to the time. It’s a fun little game which is addictive to play over and over, and certainly the game is benefitted by using save sates to progress so you can go deeper in the ocean without having to start from scratch every time.
Next up is another of the more well known games in the collection with Asteroids from 1981. In this game you control a space ship represented by a triangle that starts in the centre of the screen, and your goal is to fly around and rotate around to aim and shoot all the surrounding asteroids. As you shoot one it will break into smaller pieces and once you’ve obliterated all the pieces and cleared the screen you’ll be instantly into the next stage.
An annoying thing you’ll learn the hard way is that if you clear a level whilst on the left or right of the screen you’ll instantly be surrounded by as many asteroids as you were when the previous round started and have little chance to avoid doom.
Asteroids is one of those legendary games like Tetris, Donkey Kong, Pac Man or of course Space Invaders which has such a simple concept and is just as much fun to play today as it was decades ago. Unlike so many modern games, which are increasingly complicated, the concept here is just shooting lazers from a space ship to blow up asteroids before they hit you and blow you up. And it still works!
Canyon Bomber is an example of filler on this cartridge. An overly simple game which would struggle to be seen as worthy as a free to play game on smart phones these days. The idea is that you have two competing planes flying opposite direction towards each other, but before you get ideas that this is some kind of elaborate mid-air game of chicken or jousting, it’s not that exciting. You play the game by just tapping a single button and have no control over the flight of your aircraft. When you tap the button your plane drops a bomb and destroys bricks down below to score points. Whoever destroys the most bricks wins, and in one sense you could see the game as an upside-down game of breakout. That is of course without the pong like paddle to move to bounce bombs to break bricks.
The only slight element of skill involved is that you have to time when you drop bombs to hit the most bricks and that if you press the button twice in a row too quickly in succession the first bomb you dropped will disappear before its done all the damage it can. This isn’t a good game in the collection.
Crystal Castles is one of my favourite games in the collection, and one I’d never heard of before booting it up on the Evercade. The game is an isometric 3D platformer which plays similar to Pac Man. From the box art shown on the game select screen it would seem you play as a wizard Teddy bear which is a cool thing in itself, but the in game sprite looks much more like a mouse.
You have a surprising amount of control of the character as you move around a variety of mazes and have to collect all the pellets (or whatever they are) whilst avoid running into a baddie. The controls for the character are really responsive and this was an addictive game that I really enjoyed. It felt a much more modern game then many in the collection, and whilst still very simple game is a much more complete feeling game with different levels to learn and villains to challenge which changes the strategy.
Centipede is another of the heavy hitters here, and is another addictive shooter in the Space Invaders mould. Of course, the ideas here is that a centipede is what is coming down the screen towards you instead of the aliens in Space Invaders and the bugs in Galaxian, but it’s still fairly similar.
A couple of unique features of this game is that much like those rumours you heard about worms as a kid, if you shoot and cut the centipede in half it will split into two and then you have two shorter independent worms coming at you. When you manage to shoot the individual segments of the creature they also turn into blocks which can then be destroyed, because if they’re not, they will create barriers that will mean the centipede will travel down the screen even faster. Lastly unlike other games of this type you can move your ship about a quarter of the way up the screen to dodge if a baddie gets down to your level.
A great game that is one of the highlights of the collection.
Double Dunk is a two on two basketball game, but I can say straight off the bat that NBA Jam this is not. It controls ok enough, but when the players get into close proximity on screen it can be a bit confusing which is your player and which is the opponent.
There’s not a lot to the game other than you pass the ball back and forth and shoot at the basket, but after not long you’ll feel like you’ve seen it all. There are a bunch of options to add variety to the game including the length of the game being dictated by time or how many points you need to score to win. You can also play with the rules such as how long you can hold the ball without passing or shooting or whether fouls are legal or not. This is ok for a short play here or there, but again works mostly as filler and variety.
Desert Falcon sees you control an actual falcon rather than the name be a reference to a aircraft of any kind, and you fly over landscapes in the desert whilst dodging villains and pyramids. This game wasn’t as easy to get into and the controls were a bit annoying as your options are to hold up to move along the ground slowly, or to press down and then you go into auto flight. Pressing up again will land your bird, and if anything the idea of pressing down to ‘go up’ in the air and up to land just feels back to front.
Food Fight is another fun game which came out in 1987, and with some of the more recent games you can definitely see how the developers were progressing to make fuller concepts in their games.
Each level takes place on a single screen and you have to navigate the main character Charley Chuck across the stage to eat an ice cream. This sounds simple enough, but with varied levels and villains and even that you can pick up various foods to throw as weapons just makes this more of complex game then some games such as Canyon Bomber for example.
Gravitar is a similar game to Asteroids. You control a triangle, and rotate around a screen and shoot, but instead of giant meteorites to hit you have to blast some flying saucers. The real challenge comes in that there are various stars, moons and planets dotted around the screen and their gravitational pull will mean you constantly have to fight being dragged into a collision course with them. It makes the controls a little frustrating, but you’ll have fun with it if you can get used to it.
Missile Command is another of those games which is fondly remembered by many players from the era, and has addictive gameplay which hasn’t really aged that much. This game could be described as Space Invaders crossed with Bust-a-Move, which I’m sure will have several of you at first say huh, and then when you think about it realise I’m right. Unlike Space Invaders you cannot control your ship and fire projectiles from a central position much like in Bust-a-Move. And instead of actual visible baddies on screen you are instead shooting their bullets out the air before the bullets hit the Space Invaders like bases at the bottom.
Motor Psycho ticks the box to have some racing variety on the cartridge, and is a fun racer, but don’t expect this to be your favourite racer ever. The graphics are big and colourful and whilst you do get the sense that sometimes you are just sliding across the tracks, you do get some nice leaning and turning animation when it kicks in.
The controls also feel good and even in your first couple of tries you’ll find that you feel like you’re picking them up and improving as you go along. You can even make your motorbike jump which is fun as you look for the perfect opportunities to pull off a jump and catch some air.
Next up we have Night Driver, and this is pretty bad. You control a car which is represented by what looks like a badly drawn tie fighter from Star Wars. What is surprising is that according to the instruction booklet this game is supposedly in first person, which makes me wonder what the avatar is meant to be. The cars you go by look good, which make me wonder why your avatar couldn’t have looked the same, but everything else here looks pretty awful. The road is only visible by the perforated lines that represent the turns in the road. If you hit the sides you crash and it’s game over. Expect that to happen often as when you hit the accelerate button the turns come at you so fast you really don’t stand a chance.
Night Driver is maybe the worst example of filler yet.
Ninja Golf is a game I’d heard of before getting this collection, but never played. It’s kinda a weird idea. You’re dressed as a ninja like Sub Zero from Mortal Kombat, and is an early beat em up game. You start each section of a level by putting a golf ball with a club and then as you chase after where you hit the ball you have to fight and kill other ninjas, giant frogs etc. It makes no sense, but is actually quite fun to play.
Steeplechase will feel familiar to anyone who have played one of those horse racing mechanical games at seaside arcades – either the big ones where you have to roll balls into holes to speed up your horse, or where you put in coins to bet on a winner. Not that this plays exactly like either of those – it just really looks visually like one of those games. One of the older games on the cartridge this is a super basic game where you have to control when your horse and jockey jumps over hurdles to get the smoothest landing and keep your pace up. And that’s the game! Very simple, and barely what would feel like a game in its own right these days, but fun as a Wario Ware style mini game.
Swordquest Earthworld didn’t win me over straight away as I was super confused about what the objective of the game was. It feels a little like you’re in the Lost Woods in the Legend of Zelda where you move from one screen to the next and it looks basically the same.
If you hit the action button you’ll see if there are any items in the room and then you can choose to pick up or leave any other items you are carrying in that room. This game would have been much better if you could see the items in the actual room you are in rather then just on a menu screen. Also every time you go from one screen to the next you get what I can only describe as a Resident Evil style door loading screen where it gives a first person view of you going into the next screen.
Also every so often you’ll see some random numbers come up on screen which are clues to what you must do next, and you sometimes come to more action orientated screens where you must dodge rainbows or other things on the screen, or hope across logs like in the game Frogger. With a few quality of life changes I’m sure there’s a fun retro game in here that could be made, but it’s too unclear what you’re meant to be doing to really recommend.
Tempest is another famous game in this collection, and if you’ve never played it before you control an avatar the moves around the edge of what looks like a pair of underpants…it’s meant to be space with a 3D perspective, but you’ll only see underpants now (you’re welcome), and you shoot at enemies that come towards you Space Invaders style on the 3D plane.
Having checked the info for this game in the instructions I was surprised to see that this was a prototype that was developed and never actually released. I’m sure the rom of it has been floating around the internet for a long time, and I’d imagine that it has probably been included in other collections such as this, but it’s still cool to see that the Evercade is a way for previously cancelled or unreleased games to be released officially.
It also makes sense that this game may not have been released though, as although it is definitely Tempest, it was by far the least impressive version of the game I’ve encountered before.
Video Pinball is up next, and it’s worth noting here how glorious it is to play some old games that are so old that they can literally have descriptive names like Video Pinball or Adventure and the publishers thought that would be enough to distinguish the games from any other release.
What can be said about this? It’s video pinball. The graphics are as simple as could ever be to layout a pinball table and you fire a ball and control the flippers as you try to stop the ball falling into a pit and ending the round. As someone who isn’t an expert in pinball either in the real world or video games I can say that it feels like pinball and I guess the physics of the ball worked as I expected.
Yars’ Return is another game that wasn’t released back in the day and on the menu screen lists it as being from 2005! I guess it’s a sequel to Yars’ Revenge and when I first played it I thought my game had glitched as it was such a visual mess of flashing pixels. Of course this is intended, but I did feel after a short while that I didn’t enjoy all the garbled pixels.
You control a ship and have to shoot at an enemy (again of the Y-fronts variety) in the centre of the screen. They are protected by a variety of barriers in different shapes and some which move that you can blast through as you try to shoot the enemy. Watch out for the spinning disc that can be sent out at you which is lightning fast and also for the slow moving lazers too. Especially as they get hidden by the pixles which also slow you down as you try to go through. One thing that is cool is that if you go through the barrier you can drill or eat you way through the blockades too.
Another game which was fun to see get an official release many years after the system was out of vogue.
The final game on the collection is the 1990 Atari 7800 game Alien Brigade. This is one of the most recent games in the collection and definitely one of the most impressive. The game is a light gun game which obviously you have to play using the D-pad on the Evercade. This didn’t bother me at all, as I often enjoyed playing some light gun games with an on screen cursor back in the day as well. The gameplay is repetitive and although it’s an old game, it has everything you’d expect from a light gun game and feels a good addition to this collection in terms of variety and a nice game that is fun to return to here and there for some mindless shooting action.
The game has lots of things to shoot at including tanks and army dudes and also lots of alien scum which look like giant locusts and other nasties. Occasionally there will be humans you mustn’t shoot which is an essential piece to the light gun genre as it means you have to think before you shoot. You can also pick up extra ammo and have limited number of big shells you can fire to do more damage.
Conclusion
And so there you have it. The Atari Collection 1 for the Evercade gives you 20 classic games to get your teeth into. The highlights are definitely Centipede, Missile Command, Adventure, Alien Brigade, Crystal Castles, and Food Fight, and whilst there are a few that feel like filler, there is still plenty for any retro fan to get a lot of enjoyment out of.
It is worth noting that both Centipede and Asteroids are represented with the Atari 7800 versions on the Atari Collection 2 cartridge, and in one sense you can understand that they felt justified to include both those and the 2600 versions here, but with a few cases of filler in both collections as well it may have been better to either look for alternative titles to include or just cut the filler to make a single really good collection. I understand that they wouldn’t do that as they can sell two separate collections this way, but it’s still worth noting and I guess considering they’re cheap releases we shouldn’t complain too much.
If you’ve got an Evercade you should get this for your collection and whilst it may feel a little too old for some players who maybe grew up with the era of the NES or Super Nintendo, there’s still lots of fun to be had, and this is another great collection for the video game historians out there!
For more Evercade and other gaming reviews check out the Evercade Section and Gaming Section of the site. Also check out our all our gaming videos on the Extreme Improv YouTube Channel.
