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Like Sega's Saturn, the Nintendo 64, or the third
Playstation, the Atari 5200 holds the dubious distinction of being
the first game console to weaken the dominance of a former industry
leader. It's also the
first game system that was undone by an overzealous marketing
department. Originally
based on the hardware used in the Atari 400 computer, Atari made the
dreadful mistake of anchoring the system to a proprietary controller
so awful, it must have flown out of Pandora's box with all the other
demons.
However, once you've moved beyond the mushy, non-centering,
oversized, numeric keypad-wielding disaster (or better yet, replaced
it with something usable), you'll find that the Atari 5200 wasn't
entirely deserving of the reputation that haunts it to this very
day. In many ways, it's
better suited to playing video games than its more popular
competitor, the ColecoVision, with specialized hardware that can
smoothly scroll playfields and display over a hundred onscreen
colors. Its cousins in
the Atari computer line prove just how incredible the 5200 could
have been, if only Atari had stood by it rather than dumping the
system for the decidedly less impressive Atari 7800 in
1984.
Unlike most children of the 80's, my own experience with the
Atari 5200 was a favorable one. That had a lot to do with
the fact that I had a suitable alternative to the horrendous
controllers included with the unit. The system I constantly
borrowed from a friend- then eventually purchased- had that holy
grail of 5200 accessories, the Wico Command Control. Thanks to the included
Y-cable, this candy red joystick could play everything the stock
controller could, only better.
It had both the versatility of analog and the razor-sharp
precision and arcade feel of digital, putting it a quantum leap
ahead of nearly every controller available in the early
1980's.
Without the albatross of the fiendish stock controller around
my neck, I was free to enjoy the system to its fullest. The Atari 5200 was a true
evolution of the console that started it all, with the same vibrant
color as the Atari 2600 but a vastly improved sound chip, more
detailed visuals, and enough memory for arcade conversions that left
nothing to the imagination.
Although the upstart NES was well out of my price range in
1986, I didn't feel like I was missing out, because what I had was
already better than what had come before it.
Eventually, I did buy that NES. Then that was replaced by a
Sega Genesis.
Eventually, the Atari 5200 was trampled by the march of time,
and the system that served me so well through the mid 1980's was
sold to make room and money for other consoles. However, that seperation
would not last forever.
The impulsiveness of my youth eventually made way for the
nostalgic pangs of a man who longed to reclaim it. One trip to eBay and a
week's wait later, I was reunited with the console that devoured so
many of my rainy childhood afternoons... and it was just as much fun
as it was when I was twelve!
Here now are reviews of the Atari 5200 games that I enjoyed
as a child, along with the titles that I've only recently added to
my collection.
When an invading force seals Earth inside an energy grid, you'll need to ride the glowing rails high above the planet in search of the aliens responsible. Your primary targets are the wily white saucers that dance along the grid, but you'll also have to deal with a variety of security droids that block your shots and restrict your movement. Once you've cleared the sector of saucers, a massive mothership appears in the horizon... nail it with a missile and you'll earn a huge bonus before advancing to a more heavily guarded sector. The game gives you a few stages to learn the ropes, then unleashes hell upon you with an avalanche of aggressive adversaries. By the time you reach the eighth sector, you'll be begging for the yellow chirpers that provide you with extra ships. Just make sure you don't blast them by mistake when they finally make an appearance! This
is one of the better versions of Activision's overlooked shooter,
but it suffers slightly next to Beamrider on the ColecoVision due to
the 5200's low resolution. The blocky playfield just doesn't
sell the stark futuristic setting as well as the sharp blue grid in
the ColecoVision game. Also, the sound effects are somewhat
high-pitched, lacking the raw impact that the snarling explosions
had on other game consoles. On the plus side, the gameplay is
every bit as good as it was on other systems, and unlike the
ColecoVision release, you've got an honest chance at hitting the
mothership in later sectors.
A
friend of mine used the term "tedious and process-oriented" to
describe an entirely different game, Cosmic Chasm for the
Vectrex. However, that description works just as well for Blue
Print, a mindbendingly bizarre Japanese arcade game that was first
developed by Jaleco, then brought to the United States by
Midway. Try to wrap your head around this... you're a
vaudeville performer, trying to rescue your buxom bride-to-be from
an evil Calfornia Raisin. Wait, wait, it gets better... you
have to burglerize houses to collect leftover shoes, pressure
cookers, and trumpets. Once you've amassed enough junk, you
can build a not-so-awesome mech that fires basketballs at the grape
rapist. By now, you're on the verge of an aneurysm trying to
make sense of all this, so I'll just jump ahead to the review.
You have to work hard to enjoy Blue Print... the frantic action of
most arcade games has been replaced with memorization, forcing you
to think carefully while hunting down the pieces you'll need to
clobber the fruit at the top of the screen. It doesn't help
matters much when an unstoppable monster blocks the only entrance to
the maze, and deadly flowerpots plummet with the kind of uncanny
accuracy that defies the laws of physics. The game redeems
itself by being an extremely faithful conversion of a very flawed
coin-op... the suburbs in Blueprint are dripping with rich color and
ornate detail, and unlike the 2600 version, every play mechanic and
enemy (no matter how aggravating) is left
intact.
Oh,
Buck Rogers! Who could forget your hokey science-fiction
action? Your phallic robots who talk like Mr. Spacely with
laryngitis and wear jewelry so gaudy it makes Flava Flav
jealous? Or your saggy stars who give the average viewer a
whole new appreciation for William Shatner? There's only one
thing about you that's easy to forget, and that's your library of
games. The Genesis release by Electronic Arts was a long and
booooring turn-based RPG. The ColecoVision cartridge looked
like it was giving the system and anyone who dared to play it a
seizure. The "best" game you've had to offer over the past
twenty five years was on the Atari 2600, and even that wasn't
winning over many shooter fans despite nifty 3D effects. You
had a chance to polish up that game when you brought it over to the
more powerful Atari 5200, but instead of broadening its horizons,
you somehow made it worse. Tight control was the order of the
day in the 2600 game, but the next-generation release has the
unwelcome addition of inertia, making this interstellar slalom both
monotonous AND frustrating! Sorry Buck, but as usual, your
game bidee-bidee-bidee-bites.
In
the early 1980's, Choplifter was a game with a lot of promise but
very little underlying substance. You'd fly behind enemy
lines, scoop up prisoners of war, then return them to a base at the
right side of the screen... and that was pretty much it. A
later Sega arcade adaptation (and a subsequent Master System port)
would give the game everything that it was missing, but those
luxuries are absent from the Atari 5200 version of Choplifter.
It's just you, the hostages, and a long procession of tanks which
have a knack of showing up at the worst possible moments. It's
a game of patience rather than skill... you swoop down to grab a few
POWs, return to the skies to bomb the tank that's crept up on you,
and repeat the process until your chopper is packed with
people. Occasionally, you'll see a jet fly past, but the pilot
is such a Spaceballs-caliber moron that he'll probably never hit you
with his payload of missiles. "Keep firing, assholes!"
Anyway, if you like your intense shooters without much intensity or
shooting, you might want to look into this one. Otherwise,
step up to the Master System version of Choplifter... calling it an
upgrade from the original is like calling a Goodyear radial tire a
slight step up from a crudely chiseled stone
wheel.
Still, the designers get plenty of credit for a port that spares no details in its reproduction of Williams' merciless side-scrolling shooter. A small jet of flame erupts from your ship as you race to save the next humanoid from abduction, and a diverse assortment of foes crowd the screen, only to burst into cosmic confetti as they're struck by your laser blasts. There's even that brief moment before your ship explodes when the game triples in speed. Why is it there? What purpose does it serve? Nobody knows... all that matters is that it was in the arcade game, and it's here as well.
Although
its streamlined control ensures that the 5200 version of Defender
will never be as tough as the arcade version, there's still plenty
of challenge to be had in the highest difficulty setting, where the
Landers will stop at nothing to strip your planet of life.
Do you loves you some bosses? Do you wish that Gorf had consisted entirely of flagship stages? Do you buy every Treasure game you can find, then complain whenever you have to wade through a minute and a half of tiny ships to reach that next screen-filling nemesis? Do your nipples get hard when you hear the words "Warning... a giant battleship approaches?" If so, you should get a good therapist, or barring that, a copy of The Dreadnaught Factor. In this Activision shooter, all you fight are bosses, and they're large enough to fill the first ten minutes of a Star Wars movie! They brake for nobody on their way to destroy your puny planet, so it's up to you and your even punier ship to put these behemoths out of commission with a series of bombing raids. First, you'll take out the engines of the Dreadnaught to halt its progress, then you'll bomb the radiation vents, resulting in a devastating nuclear explosion that reduces the city-sized foe to space dust. The game starts out slowly, and ends there on the lower difficulty levels. However, crank up the difficulty to five or six and you'll get a more fitting challenge in the later stages, where the Dreadnaughts are devilishly designed and bristling with laser cannons and missile launchers! Throw in smoothly scrolling graphics and analog control that's essential to the gameplay (rather than ruining it like in most 5200 shooters) and you've got an experience that's REALLY boss!
Frogger lost a lot of his slippery luster at the end of the 20th century, thanks mostly to a lame Playstation update by Hasbro Interactive but also because Konami seems to have no idea what to do with him. Even Konami's direct conversions of the arcade original always seem to be missing something, and the less said about Frogger's Great Adventure, the better. However, things were different in the early 1980's. The name "Frogger" was a mark of quality, and crummy ports of the game for home consoles were few and far between. Unfortunately for Atari 5200 owners, they beat the odds and got one of those ports. The game's shabby graphics- as grungy as the rotting corpse of Kurt Cobain and with a color palette only Stevie Wonder could love- could be forgivable if it weren't for the wretched, wretched gameplay. It lacks the spontaneity of the coin-op thanks to a new control scheme designed to accommodate the 5200's non-centering controllers. Rather than merely pushing the controller in any direction to make your frog hop, you've got to hold the fire button, THEN push the joystick in any direction, THEN release the fire button to get moving. A severely pared down soundtrack flattens, drowns, and devours what little charm was left in this arcade conversion. Better luck next time, Parker Bros.!
"Ooh, ooh, ooh! Kangaroo! Punch out a monkey, eat a piece of fruit!" Not only is this jingle one of the best songs ever written, it perfectly describes this side-view action game offered as the 5200's alternative to Donkey Kong. As a fiercely maternal marsupial known only as "Mom," you've got to scale to the top of a series of levels to rescue your son, clobbering the pink primates in your path while dodging their apples. Along the way, you can gobble up fruit and ring a bell to call down some more, leading the player to wonder, "Why does some of the fruit give you points while the stuff the monkeys throw knocks you out the moment it hits you?" This in turn leads the player to the conclusion that it's not fruit those monkeys are tossing at you...
On a less scatalogical note, Kangaroo is an extremely close conversion of a flawed arcade game. You're forced to tap up on the controller to bound over the gaping holes in each level, which proves doubly frustrating when you realize how little room for error the game allows. Get too close to the edge of a platform and you'll plummet from it. Stand on solid ground and you won't reach the next platform when you leap for it. The imprecise jumping and brutal level design won't stop you from enjoying Kangaroo, but it does keep the game from reaching the heights of its more distinguished cousin Donkey Kong.
All right, I'll admit it... I haven't been fair to the 5200 version of Megamania in the past. I got a negative first impression from playing the game on an emulator, but it turned out that it was running in PAL mode, making it slower and less exciting than its 2600 counterpart. With that sheepish admission out of the way, let's get to the review! At its proper speed on the actual system, Megamania is nearly identical to its Atari 2600 cousin... the only differences worth mentioning are a stylish title screen and greatly improved visuals. What were once abstract shapes have become the random assortment of household items the game's creator had always imagined. Diamond rings have a gem-like luster, clothing irons shoot jets of steam, and ice cream sandwiches spin through the sky, but they all meet the same fate when they fall into your ship's crosshairs. Considering the Atari 5200's abilities, Megamania could have been even flashier... a scrolling starfield and elaborate explosions would have really put this game over the top. Still, even if this conversion doesn't have the highest aspirations, it nails all the fundamentals, putting it a parsec ahead of sad-sack 5200 shooters like Gorf, Galaxian, and Vanguard.
Now's your chance to become the king of the mountain... without the fear of being stabbed by pencils or drowned in orange soda by an obnoxious milkshake. Mountain King is a laid back yet brilliantly designed action game that draws you in like nothing else on the Atari 5200. You'll feel like you're really there, scooping up diamonds and hunting for the fire spirit that will grant you passage to the throne room and its riches. The game really comes to life when you compare it to its stiff ColecoVision counterpart... the gems sparkle in the moonlight, the Grieg soundtrack makes your heart race, and your spindly alter ego darts across the playfield and bounds over cliff tops with the grace of a lively gazelle. When you strip away the aesthetics of Mountain King, you won't find much depth underneath, but the game is so entrancing that you either won't notice or will improvise with your own adventures. Is there anything hiding in the shadows aside from the fire spirit? Can you sneak into the throne room without it? Does the gigantic spider at the foot of the mountain have any weaknesses? Even after you're done playing the game for a high score, you'll spend hours trying to solve these mysteries.
Hmm... looks like Parker Bros. didn't have much luck with this conversion, either! On the plus side, the game looks nice- certainly better than the monstrocity that was the 2600 version- and it's one of the only ports with true diagonal movement. You don't have to rotate the controller slightly or guess which direction will make Q*Bert hop to the upper left rather than off the playfield... the direction you move the controller is the direction he'll jump, period. That's great, but having to press a button every time you want to move isn't. It slows the gameplay down to a crawl and makes movement less natural than it could or should have been. Yes, yes, it's obvious WHY Parker Bros. did this, but it would have been nice to have other options available. You can only imagine how well this port would have played with a Wico Command Control stick, but because you're stuck pressing buttons to make the proboscis-packing puffball jump, all you CAN do is imagine. Uh... better luck next time, Parker Bros.?
Qix distances itself from all the conventions of early 1980's gaming to create an experience that defies comparison. You don't shoot anything, you don't eat anything, and you don't jump over anything... your only goal is to claim as much onscreen real estate as possible by drawing over it with a pulsating, diamond-tipped pen. The center of the playfield holds an aggressive multicolored streak of energy called the Qix, but dawdling on the edges isn't too bright, either, as they're patrolled by sparks of electricity. The trick is to trap the world's most dangerous light show in one tiny portion of the screen, then close the hole to take most of the playfield and net a huge point bonus. That's the long and short of the Taito arcade game, which was ported exceptionally well to the 5200. The graphics are appallingly low res, lessening the stark beauty of the original and leaving you with less room to move, but everything else is faithfully reproduced. That includes not only the constant tension heightened by an armada of angry sound effects, but the thrill of building a wall between two Qix or claiming an enormous chunk of the playfield.
Just a warning up front... don't even think of playing this with just one controller. Sure, you can use the trigger to fire, but it's like tying your shoes with one hand, or baking a cake with half the ingredients. It's theoretically possible, but just not very smart. You'll see the true genius of Robotron: 2084 only after you break out a second controller, along with a coupler to anchor them both in place. This frantic Williams shooter has just two goals... destroy all robots and save all humans. The androids start out dimwitted at first, only to increase in number and intelligence after every stage. Single-minded GRUNTS and stationary Electrons are quickly joined by tank-spawning Sphereoids, unstoppable Hulk droids, and the queen of this demented chess set, the dreaded Brain Robotrons. No matter how cunning the Robotron force gets, you can count on the last human family to remain as hapless and stupid as they were from the moment the game began. They wander right into the gleaming metal claws of the robot armada, making you wonder if you should just let natural selection take its course and escape the planet with your own life. While you're thinking about that, you'll also ask yourself how the 5200 is capable of such a close translation, or how it manages to put so many sprites onscreen at once without bursting into flames. Even the occasional slowdown and slightly choppy animation don't detract from a beautiful arcade port that will forever remain one of the Atari 5200's proudest moments.
Before I start this review, let me get this out of my system.... AIIIIIIGGHH!!! Ahem. Now, to the review. AIIIIIIGGHH!!! That's the word that best describes the merciless gameplay of Super Cobra, Konami's soul-crushing spin-off of Scramble. That game's sleek red rocket has been replaced with a sluggish, oversized helicopter, and you'll have to squeeze this air barge through some of the tightest tunnels witnessed since the host of The Weakest Link had her last colonoscopy. Oh, but that's not all! The harmless mystery bases from Scramble have been replaced with tanks, which have an uncanny habit of pelting you with cannon fire just as you fly over them. And did I mention that those cramped caverns are usually peppered with missiles and aerial mines that spring to life when you least expect it? Even with an infinite supply of bullets and bombs at your disposal, you can tell that this is gonna be a bumpy ride.
Mascochists
who look forward to this kind of torture will be happy to know that
Super Cobra is a reasonably close arcade conversion... unlike the
incredibly flawed ColecoVision version, your helicopter is very
clearly a helicopter and not a Volkswagen Bug with a tail, and the
stages have a distinctly organic look, with each cavern holding all
the nooks and crannies you came to expect from the coin-op.
However, Super Cobra on the 5200 just can't be played with the
system's stock controller. Seriously, don't even try it.
You won't make it past the first stage because the control is so
touchy. Replace it with a joypad and you might reach the sixth
stage before your sanity slips away and you start frothing at the
mouth. It's not a question of "if," but "when."
Anyway, Atari's half of Zaxxon controls wonderfully and looks very much like the arcade game... up to the point where you infiltrate the castle. That's when you notice the fortress seems surprisingly empty, as if its occupants were in the process of moving across the street. The missile silos are gone, the jets preparing for take-off are gone, and even the landing strips they were resting on have vanished! The disillusionment only grows once you've left the castle and battle your first fleet of enemy planes. Your once agile ship is trapped on the bottom of the screen as formations of incredibly stupid jets fly straight toward you, practically begging to be gunned down. Things pick up a bit once you've reached the second castle, but
after you fly through the gauntlet of laser barriers, that crushing
disappointment comes right back in the form of the worst boss fight
ever witnessed in a video game. Geez Sega, if you're going to name
your game Zaxxon, you might want to make the battle with Zaxxon
worth the trouble of struggling to reach it!
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