Before you can create the future, one must understand the past. Atari is a name synonymous with the earliest days of video games, yet often times is most know for its incredible fall rather than what it did for the industry. Without these colored dots and quaint bleeps and bloops there is a good chance gaming wouldn’t be as ingrained into the culture as it is today.
The Atari Vault is a wonderful love letter to a different time, when arcades were the place where kings were made. It was a place in time when having your initials sitting atop of a leader-board meant you had some serious clout in your neighborhood. The Atari Vault really does a marvelous job of recreating this world while including 100 mostly classic games.
Right off the bat you will notice the Tron like environment the pack throws you into. The menu is easy to navigate as you scroll through arcade machines that have been recreated with scans possible renders possible. It’s a joy to be able to flip around a cabinet and remember all the details that made each unique. The same can be said of the Atari home console section that feature scans of the original boxes from all the games on tap. It’s great because finding any Atari games in a box is becoming a rarity, so being able to flip a box around to read about a game brings back some serious nostalgia.
I was already pretty happy at this point, but the Atari Vault takes things a step further by having scans of the original manuals. Many won’t ever check these out, but as a serious fan and collector, it is a true joy to flip through a manual. These are actually important as many Atari games relied on your imagination with no “tutorials” like they have today. You have one button and a joystick with some blocks moving about, so the game manuals filled you in on the world the developers were building. Something like the SwordQuest series is even more special as the included comic book is here and intact.
Games are all really simple, yet fun even to this day. One thing that many modern fans may find strange is that a good chunk of those historic games aren’t here. While Atari had a numbers of classics, publishers like Activision and others have some legendary titles that Atari doesn’t have the rights to. This doesn’t hurt the pack as I understand the difference, but newer audiences may be miffed at what’s included. Still, for the price you really can’t go wrong. The $20 the games costs will get you 100 games, so that comes out to around 20 cents per title which is a steal.
The games themselves are lovingly emulated with cabinet windows for the arcade section and cropped for the home console ones. A gamepad is recommended, but as these games are so simple you can get by with a keyboard. There isn’t much to say about these titles as everything is so basic that anyone can understand –aside from the overly complicated adventure games– but where this pack really shines is in the multiplayer.
I don’t do the online thing, but that is something essential as Atari was built around local competitive play. There are no endings to these games, so it’s all about getting that high-score to show off with. The games that offer multiplayer have it built in for online and getting into a game is really easy. Find a game you like and launch a multiplayer session as a host, or find a game already in wait. I can fire up a session of Sprint 2 in the arcade section and go off and play Canyon Bomber while I wait for someone to find my game. It’s a seamless system that works well. The game will also toss you back into whatever you were playing, so when my session of Sprint 2 ended and I quit, I was tossed right back into Canyon Bomber right where I left off.
There is a lot here to like. Whether you are a younger gamer that is interested in the history of where this industry came from, or if you’re someone who grew up with these games. The Atari Vault offers something for everyone in a great package. Sure, there are a lot of games in the home console section that are beyond bland –Real Sports anything– but there are enough treasures here to make it a solid recommendation.
Pros
+ Lot of arcade and console games
+ Great layout
+ Solid multiplayer
Cons
– Some games are pretty bad
– Some cabinet and box renders could be of higher quality
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