This just in! It's already December, somehow. It's not going to be one of my better Decembers... in fact, it could be the last December for an aging loved one, whose health has been on the decline over the last couple of months. She seemed all but invincible as early as last year, lifting huge bags of pet food and cat litter into the back of her car during grocery trips unless I was there to intervene... and even then, it took some convincing to get her to let me lift the bags for her!
But now she's confused, and scared, and subject to wild mood swings. It's like her memories are playing back from a hard drive with corrupt sectors, shifting from one scratched ceramic plate to the next in order to stave off a system shutdown. During a family Thanksgiving party, she cried about her daughter's death from cancer in the early 1980s, as if it happened yesterday. The family can't even trust her beyond the wheel of a car anymore, and it's got me worried for the future. It could just be the side effects of an infection, but I'm not optimistic. I mean, as a general rule I'm not optimistic, but especially not about this situation.
As a result, it's been hard to concentrate on my creative pursuits, including this blog. I do feel it's a good time to look back at the last month of gaming news. The first, admittedly anecdotal report? I bought an Atari 7800+ and an Atari VCS on sale from Woot and Atari, respectively. While the Atari VCS (effectively a laptop computer minus the screen, squeezed into a vaguely console-like shell) has yet to arrive... or even ship after four days... the Atari 7800+ has stunk up the house for a couple weeks now.
As you may have already gathered, I'm not impressed with this machine in the least. It's not a real Atari 7800, using a system on a chip running an emulator, connected to a cartridge slot. What this means is that you're introduced to significant access time as the contents of the inserted cartridge are dumped and transferred to system RAM. Access time! On a cartridge! An ATARI 7800 cartridge! They're rarely more than 128K in size! You could put a dozen of 'em on a floppy disc!
One of the best things about old game systems like the Atari 7800 was their immediacy... you pop in a cartridge and press the power button, and you're already at the title screen, one squeeze of the joystick button away from the action. The Atari 7800+ somehow merges the worst of modern and old-school gaming... you're getting Atari 7800 quality games, at the interminable speeds of a new game console, with its penchant for corporate logos that swallow the screen and lengthy loading that burns through your precious free time.
Does that sound like a winning combination for anyone else? Because Atari games that start at glacial Neo-Geo CD speeds is a total non-starter for me. I'd rather go the mini console route, where you're given instant access to a library of highlights in that console's library. Hack the thing and you can squeeze a good chunk of the library onto the system. It's what I've done with the Genesis Mini and Super NES Classic, two consoles which I've grown to love as much as the consoles that inspired them.
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| The Atari 7800+ in all its, ahem, glory. Note the controller, with its buttons set five blocks apart from each other. I wasn't big on the ProLine joysticks either, but good lord, this isn't much of an improvement. (image from WallpaperAccess) |
The Atari 7800+, on the other hand, rarely finds its way out of its box. It's comically hard to update*, comes with a cheap feeling wireless controller with buttons that seem to have restraining orders against each other, doesn't include any games beyond the okay-ish Crystal Castles follow-up Bentley's Crystal Quest, and will never play anything beyond titles for the Atari 2600 and the Atari 7800, nobody's favorite in the console wars of the late 1980s. The Atari 7800+ kind of blows, is the takeaway here. There's a million ways to play Atari games, instantly. Why the hell would you wait twenty-five seconds to do it?
I hope the coming Atari VCS is better. It would just about have to be.
* even for a seasoned IT expert! Good lord, I worked at a computer store during the malware epidemic of 2003, and updating this hardware was tougher than fumigating Bonzi Buddy from the Dell Granny Gertrude bought from Circuit City in 1998!
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