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The Atari 10-in-1 game
system.
written
by Jon - october 7- 2003
This is Atari's TV Games video game system. It combines the awesome powers of TV and games COMBINED. Its power is so awesome, in fact, that if you try to hold it in your hands, you will be blown away by it and a green tornado made of lightning will shock you in the hand and screenshots of various Atari games will be left in its wake. Oh yeah, and the sheer force of it all will apparently cause your shirt to become unbuttoned.
Atari has effectively managed to break away from the video game pack. Rather than waste money on cockamamie schemes such as designing a system advanced enough to be able to display graphics that don't look like they're made out of Legos, Atari has spent the last twenty years making handheld game systems that you can turn upside down in case of emergency. But watch out, Atari is back with a vengeance, and by a vengeance I mean a 25-year-old controller that plugs straight into the TV and needs batteries to work.
Built into the controller are ten classic Atari 2600 games. This is the perfect system for people that are of the mindset that if something requires an extra component to work, it is a money-making scam sold by soulless grifters. I see these people at work all the time.
Jon: Your total comes to
$11.65. Hey, would you like a free cell phone to go with that?
Customer: A free cell phone? Nothing's ever free, my boy!
Jon: Well, true. You're required to sign a two-year
contract, but they're actually --
Customer: Ha! That's what they don't tell you!
Jon (thinking): I just told you, you
old fuck.
Jon: Well, hey. You're getting a $300 cell phone for free,
and your monthly rate is guaranteed for two years. Can't beat
that, huh?
Customer: Ah, but then they don't even come with all the
accessories you can get for them! You think you're slick, don't
you? Now leave me alone.
Jon (thinking): Okay, have a good
one.
Jon: I hate you, you faggot.
Jon: fuck wrong IM window sry
So here's the rundown of some of the most well-recognized games ever to fit in an Atari. Pay close attention, poseurs. Now when you wear your Atari-logo shirt that you bought from Gadzooks so you can look like a dork, but on purpose, you can actually know what you're talking about when you talk about how OH MAN THE ATARI WAS THE BEST THAT'S OLD SCHOOL RIGHT THERE. HEY MAN LET'S GO TO KROGER AND RIDE AROUND THE HANDICAPPED CARTS. WE ARE FREE SPIRITS.
THE TOP TEN GAMES ON THIS SYSTEM
0. NAME OF GAME.
Description displayed on intro screen.
Witty remarks. If in a hurry, skim for boldface.
1. PONG.
Pong is played much like tennis. Each player rallies the ball by moving the paddles on the playfield. A player scores one point when the opponent hits the ball out of bounds or misses a hit. The first player to score 21 points wins the game.
I remember once reading a video game magazine that gave their 1-10 rating scale different titles for each number. Number 10 was frickin' amazing. Number 1 was Pong. After three minutes of playing, I realized that I could set my paddle about 60% of the way down the screen and leave it there, and that the computer would always serve it in such a way that it no matter how many times the ball was rallied, it would always bounce off my paddle. If the game were any easier, the object of the game would be to aim your shitchunk so that it lands in the toilet.
2. BREAKOUT.
Smash! Pow! Crunch! A brick wall appears at the top of the screen and your mission is to smash two walls of the playfield - one brick at a time. You get 5 balls per game to do this and each time the ball hits a brick, the brick disappears and you score points.
It's Pong with a storyline filled with even more plots twists and intricacies than the original. In this chapter of the continuing saga, you are a wooden board who is really angry at a rainbow and hellbent on destroying it with a ball that is cubic in dimensions, yet retains the physics of a sphere. Though it's more challenging, it's somehow less fun to play than Pong, and the quality of gameplay can be likened to putting a bucket over your head and smacking it repeatedly with a wooden spoon. SMASH. POW. CRUNCH.
3. MISSILE COMMAND
Aliens from the planet Krytol have begun an attack on the peaceful planet of Zardon. The Zardonians are prepared to fight to save their cities and have built a powerful defense system. You are a Zardonian general, but you need to act quickly as the Krytolians have begun firing inter-planetary ballistic missiles at your cities and missile bases. Your only defense is to fire back with antiballistic missiles to stop the enemy before your happy and harmonious planet is destroyed!
This game is actually pretty cool, but the story writers really dropped the ball. Instead of playing to America's greatest fear and creating a Cold War backdrop, Atari decided to go by their old standby of outer space. Almost every game Atari ever made was set in outer space, and when they weren't, their magazine ads would usually feature the game cartridge flying through outer space for no apparent reason. It doesn't really matter to me, though. I name my six cities New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. I always let New York get destroyed so that I can make believe that Roger Clemens gets decimated into a gaseous cloud of ass-fat and World Series rings. The only team-hopping he'll be doing now is from the alive team to the dead team. But by the time I've fantasized all this, a missile has taken out Atlanta so everyone can stop talking about how ATL is in on the rap scene now. It's not gangsta if you don't have a coast, G.
Also, the name Zardon is too close to Zordon. I keep thinking that pressing the orange button will summon five teenagers with attitudes and a flying-saucer-headed Jewish robot.
I ONLY HAVE ONE EYE-EYE-EYE! lol
4. ASTEROIDS
Your spaceship is trapped in a deadly Asteroid belt. You will have to destroy the drifting asteroid boulders before they destroy your spaceship, but, watch-out for enemy spacecraft. Fire your missiles to destroy the boulders and the enemy.
Another game set in outer space. It features a rockin' two note soundtrack that sounds like the killer has opened the motel door and crept menacingly into the bathroom with a butcher knife, only to stand around in front of the shower for thirty minutes and maybe take a shit or something. This game is pretty damn easy; the hard part is having the patience to play it for long enough to rack up a high score. You can move your ship around and perform a thoroughly useless "warp" maneuver that places your ship at a random spot on the screen, but it's best just to stay in the middle while spinning around in circles and firing as often as possible. Actually, that's also my advice for people who want to know how to have the best sex. Don't get it? That's because you're sexually naive.
This game's only redeeming quality is that it makes me hungry for Fruity Pebbles. But it's more like the cheap knockoff that they stock on the bottom shelf in plastic bags that shreds up your gums and makes you feel like you have a layer of plaque covering the roof of your mouth. Kids, if your mom buys this stuff for you, it's because she wishes she had aborted you with a coat hanger.
5. CENTIPEDE
Watch out! Here come the slithering centipede, the poisonous scorpion, a mischevious spider and pesky flea! Aim your magic wand and shoot sparks to stop these pests in their tracks.
THE CASE AGAINST THIS GAME
1. This game does not let you shoot quickly, and shooting games that do not let you shoot quickly are retarded.
2. Your magic wand is a small orange block which flies around of its own accord.
3. You have no idea of what is going on at any point in the game.
4. The game description sucks. Watch out! This was typed with one hand by a programmer who was busy giving himself a handjorb.
THE CASE AGAINST THIS GAME
1. You've got the magic wand. Shorty, if you can hit once, you can hit twice. You've hit the baddest chick. Shorty don't believe you, then come with you tonight, and you'll show her magic. What? What? Maaa-gic. You've got the magic wand.
2. The black background suggests that this game may or may not be set in outer space.
6. REAL SPORTS VOLLEYBALL
Do you like to play volleyball on the beach? Well, get out your suntan lotion and swimsuit because this game of volleyball offers a beach setting - the sea, the sand, the sun - even a shark!
This game does to the ocean what "JAWS" did to the ocean. It claims to have a shark in it, but I sure as hell haven't seen one in my four minutes-plus of playing this game. It reminds me of the advertisement for Duck Hunt I saw that said "DON'T SHOOT THE DOG!" Because of that, I spent a sizeable portion of my childhood trying to kill that goddamn dog.
At least I was doing that instead of playing synchronized volleyball. In Atari sports games, all your players stay in perfect formation and move identical to each other at all times. This wasn't a huge deal in games like "Pele's Soccer", since soccer is a game of luck and it doesn't really matter what you do as long as you kick the ball forward, but a game as sophisticated as volleyball really shouldn't be attempted on the Atari, much less REAL SPORTS VOLLEYBALL.
To its credit, this is one of the few games featured here that is not set in outer space. But it's a downer to play with players who looked like they fell off a Rwandan refugee truck. It hurts to fall off a truck, and that is sad. But it doesn't hurt as badly as it hurts to play this game. It's totally not worth getting struck with a green tornado lightning bolt for.
7. CIRCUS ATARI
Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop the balloons and score points. A wall of red, blue and white balloons willl appear at the top of the screen. You must pop balloons by catching a clown on the teeter-totter and bouncing him up to the balloons.
I really didn't expect a game about bouncing clowns to be any good at all. And even though it's one of the more fun games on this list, my assumptions were pretty much correct. I think the thing I like most about this game is the unadulterated terror displayed by the poor souls being catapulted dozens of feet into the air. You can justify their terror by causing a little "accident" and sending one of your clowns slamming into the "ground". His rectangular head gets smashed into a slightly more oblong rectangular head, and his extremeties jolt with the spasms of a dying man. You wouldn't think that a game on a system with the graphical quality of a Lite Brite would be able to convey such obscene brutality, but I was pleasantly surprised.
Oh, and guess what? It's rather impossible that Earth's gravity would allow a clown to teeter-totter fifty feet in the air, isn't it? And our atmosphere's surface tension would prevent a balloon from being anything but round, right? That means one thing: this game is set in outer space.
8. GRAVITAR
The evil Gravitar seeks to destroy the universe by bombarding unsuspectng galaxies with hostile gravitational forces. He then installs a powerful reactor inside each galaxy's solar system, creating a killer sun that destroys all life on the nearby planets. Automated bunkers then blockade those planets programmed to shoot. Your task is to break Gravitar's hold on these 12 solar systems. You can do this by destorying ALL bunkers or by triggering the reactors.
This is probably the best game on this system, as well as one of the hardest games of all time. It makes Myst seem easier than your mom. You're a spaceship that flies around to different planets and shoot various objects. Said objects will shoot pixels at you, but the real danger is the rather anticlimatic forces of gravity that you encounter. When you're on the planet, you have to point up and throttle just to keep from crashing. Think you're safe in outer space? Wrong. Even when you're far away from a planet, the Sun will try to suck you in. You have a tractor beam at your disposal, but as far as I can tell this is completely worthless since you die if your ship ever touches anything in the game. Oh yeah, and eventually you run out of fuel and the game ends. I don't think you can get more fuel.
At first, this game isn't so bad. The most friendly planet is the one that looks like a bunny rabbit.
But it gets tougher
and tougher
and tougher
until it just becomes impossible. This game isn't that long, but it would take me weeks to beat, before which time I would surely go insane and tape a piece of paper to my TV screen so I could draw my ship where it needed to go and on to victory. Then I would celebrate by dressing up in a space suit and running around my apartment while making spaceship noises until I ran into a wall and woke up in a special hospital where they let me play Atari games all day. That's all I'd need, really. Atari is like an instant portal to outer space. ZZZZZZOOOOM.
9. YAR'S REVENGE
The mighty yet peaceful Yars have used their powers to establish thriving communities on Planets III, IV and V in the Razak solar system. Suddenly, without warning, they were attacked by the ruthless Qotile. These evil creatures vaporized Planet IV and are now determined to destroy the Yars' entire civilization! As an expert warrior, can you help protect the Yars homeworld and avenge the destruction of Planet IV?
I assume this is a sequel to a game called Yar, in which you were probably a pirate who went on pirate adventures. This is way better. In this chapter of the ongoing saga, you're an expert warrior who looks like a moth of some sort and tries to kill a triangle before it shoots swastikas at you and kills you. In outer space. Think I'm joking? I'm an expert warrior. I've forgotten how to laugh.
So yeah, you have to shoot at the red stuff surrounding the triangle-looking thing to destroy it. But besides the swastika, you must also beware of a very slow-moving sliver of pixels that randomly wanders the screen. To further complicate things, there's this huge rainbow thing that runs down the middle of the screen, and when you're in the rainbow you can't shoot for some reason. Within thirty seconds, you'll have the first level beaten. But do you think all other levels are the same? Wrong, asshole. After this the red stuff surrounding the triangle will be in slightly different shapes. This allows for infinite replayability, and assures that this is the only game you will ever need to play in your entire life. Besides, the gripping storyline of revenge will keep you hooked.
You know what...nevermind, give me pirates.
This gets runner-up for worst game ever. The worst game ever is
10. ADVENTURE
An evil magician has stolen the Enchanted Chalice and has hidden it somewhere in the kingdom. The object of the game is to rescue the Enchanted Chalice and place it inside the Golden Castle where it belongs. But, beware, this is no easy task as the magician has created 3 dragons to hinder you in your quest for the Enchanted Chalice.
I know you've been skipping over the italics this entire article. Don't feel bad about passing over that last one. In this game, you're a dot that goes around killing giant ducks while running away from bats in your quest for the Enchanted Chalice. I beat this game in three minutes. Twenty-five years ago, one million copies of this game were sold at $25 a pop, which solidifies my theory that everything sucked and everyone was stupid until about 1988.
I WILL GIVE ONE MEELYON COPIES TO WHOEVER GETS ME OUT OF HERE
This is what Atari gets for not infusing a game with the awesome powers of outer space. I'm being completely serious when I say that this is the worst game of all time. Back then, Atari didn't publicly credit the programmers who created the games. But one dumbass didn't quite take a hint from the fates, and decided to credit himself by hiding his name somewhere in the game. Thanks for that, Warren Robinett. These days, I hear he programs TI-83 calculus programs called QUAD for coke. If you didn't get that joke, you're not enough of a nerd, and probably wandered onto the Internet because someone told you it was the weight room.
ONE MEELYON COPIIIEEEES
So, to conclude, you should only pick this system above competing systems such as the Playstation, Gamecube and XBox if:
1. you want a controller that makes you feel like you're jerking off your video-game system,
2. you're an astronaut and training for missions in outer space,
3. you want to do a trendy retro article for a website. Old = funny.
lol
- Jon
Jon@progressiveboink.com
AIM: Boiskov