Image Courtesy of Atari
At my job, for reasons unknown, we have an old manual typewriter sitting around. Whenever I brought my kids to the office they played with that typewriter like it was the most amazing piece of equipment they ever saw. Maybe they were thinking “Cool! I get a print out as soon as I type” or maybe it was the novelty of the old tech compared to the ubiquity of computers.
When Atari sent me a review copy of Atari’s Greatest Hits: Volume 1 the same phenomenon happened. I had to beg my daughter to stop playing Centipede — she currently holds the high score in the house — so I could write this review. Of course I also had to promise to play Pong with her, which you can play 2 player through a DS Wifi connection.
If you owned the original Atari 2600 or spent a better part of your youth pumping quarters into 6 foot tall consoles the list of games included in Atari’s Greatest Hits: Volume 1 will make you wax nostalgic. The classic arcade games are well represented with Asteroids, Centipede, Battle Zone and many more. If you liked the Atari 2600 sports games you get RealSports Football, RealSports Tennis and more. Prefer Racing games? They have those too. All in all there are 50 Atari titles included on this game. A number of the titles can be played single card multiplayer for head to head action.
My son can spend upwards of 45 minutes customizing, tweaking and setting up characters for a game. These classics take us back to a time when you loaded the game and played. There’s something about these games that seems to transcend the tech and go right to the heart of the matter which is playing some cool video games.
Bottom line: Want to play cool video games? Then go get Atari’s Greatest Hits: Volume 1 for the DS and return to the days of yore when all you needed were eight bits and an attitude to be a video game rock star.
Check out Tony Sims’s interview with Jeff Vavasour, founder of Code Mystics, the company behind this trip down memory lane.