Last Friday, I finally got my Legends Gamer Pro in the mail. I spent the rest of the weekend yelling at it.
I'll get into the details in a moment, but there are a couple of things I want to mention first. Anyone ever hear of the game Asuka 120%? Well, you'll be hearing a lot more about it in the coming months. This quirky fighting game with a cast of high school girls was translated to English for the Sega Saturn a few years ago, but a version of Asuka 120% will be ported to the Saturn's ancestor, the Sega Genesis, and then brought over to the Switch with extra content. Thanks to ResetEra for the scoop. Actually, I heard about this from multiple sources, but this was the only link to the news I could find in a quick Google search.
You'd think this would make me deliriously happy as a fan of both fighting games and Sega's most popular console, but there's something about Asuka 120% that really sticks in my craw. Eighty percent of it is the fighting, which is kind of floaty and generally ends in clashes where characters trade punches in mid-air until the player gets sick of hammering buttons or the CPU decides it wants to win. Is there some logic to how this works, like a rock-paper-scissors relationship between attacks? I've never been able to figure it out myself.
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| image from CD Romance |
The other, uh, forty percent of my beef with this game lies with the character designs. Everyone's got these comically oversized forearms that make you think Popeye took an extended shore leave in Japan seventeen years before the cast was born. I don't think anyone was surprised by Cathy's torpedo boobs, but the gorilla arms are one exaggerated anatomical feature that remain bewildering a quarter of a century after the game's debut.
Beyond that, I'm pretty sure the game's going to be ridiculously overpriced on the Genesis, a system that's ill-equipped to handle its large sprites and bright colors. It probably won't be Paprium bad (for a variety of reasons...), but wallet-emptying nevertheless. I'll pass.
Okay, here's the second thing I wanted to mention before I get to the Legends Gamer Pro. The streaming service CBS All-Access just became Paramount Plus, and Viacom recently dumped a crap ton of classic Nickelodeon shows onto it. Hold on, I'm getting to the relevant part here. One of those shows is Nick Arcade, a spiritual successor to the video game show Starcade thoroughly drenched in 1990s style and 16-bit era pop culture.
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| That's the most press Gun*Nac ever got, I'm sure. (image from YouTube and Stephen Wilds) |
Let me give you an idea of what you'll see in an average episode of Nick Arcade. The podiums the players stand behind are giant Game Boys. The games the contestants play are early releases for the Genesis, Neo-Geo, and Super Nintendo. The final round is a crude augmented reality challenge designed by Psygnosis, and practically impossible to play from a first person perspective. The host is a headcase who patterned his comedic stylings after Howie Mandel. It's hilarious and embarrassing at the same time... now that's cringe-ertainment!
Okay, now onto the main event. As I was saying earlier, I got my Legends Gamer Pro in the mail last Friday, and it's been giving me headaches ever since. For days I thought my system, consisting of a massive control panel and a palm-sized, disc-shaped console, was broken. Neither the second stick nor the trackball would respond to input when connected to the puck, and trying to install CoinOpsX was a vicious cycle of starting the installation process, being explicitly told that the installation was a success, then being told when trying to run the program that CoinOpsX was not on the drive. Repeat until thoroughly infuriated.
It turns out that the system wasn't broken... just AtGames' miserable customer service. There were fixes for many of the issues I was having, but I had to discover them from other users, as AtGames would not respond to repeated requests for assistance, either on Twitter or via email. The joystick dysfunction? This suggestion from Cheap-Ass Gamer forum member ZincDust put that to bed. I'm told that CoinOpsX will work after a hard reset of the system, but that hasn't worked for me yet. The games I put on my flash drive do work, but only through the AtGames "Bring Your Own Games" service, which provides only barebones functionality. It gets the job done, but the footage I've seen of CoinOpsX is so much more stylish. I want that experience, and at the rate things are going, it doesn't look like I'll ever get it.
I'd say the Legends Gamer Pro was just barely worth the $100 I paid for it. It's a surprisingly ambitious product by AtGames, with an online store, leaderboards, optional pinball tables, and compatibility with controllers beyond the included control panel... which is handy when you don't want to drag the damned thing from room to room. At the same time, it's an expectedly buggy product by AtGames, with a cryptic, stubborn, user-hostile design. Things often don't work the way they should, and the company hasn't shown much interest in guiding you through its nettle-filled hedge maze to a solution.
I nearly sent the LGP back to Wal-Mart, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because AtGames' customer service is so dire, and because they expect players to just figure things out when there are no readily apparent solutions to the issues they created. Is it obvious that disconnecting and reconnecting the control panel in the wireless pairing options will bring your trackball back to life? No. Does AtGames tell you how to get your trackball to work when the console won't recognize it? No. Why do you have to get this information from a random stranger on the internet when it's AtGames' responsibility to tell you? Hell if I know.
You may have gathered from this and previous posts on this blog that AtGames is a garbage company. Go with that feeling.
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