Atari 50th Anniversary Collection

[+DrVenkman]

Well, they managed to get YOOMP! included after all. Excellent.

 

[DavidD]

One thing I'm mildly annoyed by is that none of the review/impressions I've seen have actually CONFIRMED the final game list.

[roots.genoa]

The final list is the same as the one we knew, except they added Yoomp indeed, but removed Warbirds on Lynx. 😔

[Atariboy]

Warbirds appears to be included. I've seen it in several YouTube videos showcasing the collection over the past two days (such as the screenshot I took below from this video). 

 

 

I won't actually have my hands on this compilation for a while so I can't check myself. But unless I've been watching videos based off preview codes that Atari SA sent out to some YouTubers before release (and the videos are only now popping up with the lifting of an embargo), they should accurately reflect the released form of the game and Warbirds should be in everyone's copy of Atari 50.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Atariboy

[DavidD]

So, again, I wish someone had a final list of all titles included. Heh.

 

Is there some sort of "unlocking" function in this collection?

[spookt]

Enjoying a game of Star Raiders on the big screen this morning!

Once I figured out out to switch it into classic mode it played really nicely. 

[deffroe]

https://steamcommunity.com/id/danusn/recommended/1919470/

Reimagined
- Haunted Houses
- Neo Breakout
- Quadratrack
- Swordquest
- Touchme
- VCTR-SCTR
- Yars Revenge

ARCADE
- Akka Arrh
- Asteroids
- Asteroids Deluxe
- Black Widow
- Breakout
- Centipede
- Cloak & Dagger
- Crystal Castles
- Fire Truck
- Food Fight
- Gravitar
- I, Robot
- Liberator
- Lunar Lander
- Major Havoc
- Maze Invaders
- Millipede
- Missile Command
- Pong
- Quantun
- Space Duel
- Sprint 8
- Super BReakout
- Tempest
- Warlords

2600
- 3D Tic-Tac-Toe
- Adventure
- Air Sea Battle
- Canyon Bomber
- Centipede
- Combat
- Crystal Castles
- Dark Chambers
- Demons to Diamonds
- Dodge Em
- Fatal Run
- Haunted House
- Millipede
- Miner 2049er
- Missile Command
- Outlaw
- Quadrun
- Baseball
- Basketball
- Boxing
- Football
- Soccer
- Tennis
- Volleyball
- Saboteur
- Secret Quest
- Solaris
- Super Breakout
- Surround
- Swordquest Earthworld
- Swordquest Fireworld
- Swordquest Waterworld
- Warlords
- Yars Revenge

5200
- Bounty Bob Strikes Back
- Millipede
- Missile COmmand
- Star Raiders
- Super Breakout

7800
- Asteroids
- Basketbrawl
- Centipede
- Dark Chambers
- Fatal Run
- Ninja Golf
- Scrapyard Dog

Lynx
- Basketbrawl
- Malibu Bikini Volleyball
- Scrapyard Dog
- Super Asteroids/Missile Command
- Turbo Sub

800
- Bounty Bob Strikes Back
- Caverns of Mars
- Food Fight
- Miner 2049er
- YOOMP

JAGUAR
- Atari Karts
- Club Drive
- Cybermorph
- Dino Dudes
- Fight For Life
- Missile COmmand 3D
- Ruiner
- Tempest 2000
- Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy

[roots.genoa]

2 hours ago, DavidD said:

Is there some sort of "unlocking" function in this collection?

Not sure what you mean but some 2600 games are locked, so that probably means there won't be extra games.

 

I didn't check every game one by one, but compared the number of games per machine, and that's how I discovered Warbirds was missing. It's not on the Steam list above either.

[Mclaneinc]

It made me wonder when I saw Miner AND Bounty Bob, bit of a waste of a slot, Bounty covers both. All in all it's pretty nice, make sure you shopped around, RRP 45.00 UK, can and was got for 35.00

[+DrVenkman]

I bought it on Steam for $39.99. Some nice attention to detail in the packaging - for instance, if you enable scanline emulation in arcade Centipede, the lines are vertical because, after all, the arcade version used a CRT rotated 90 degrees for a vertical orientation.

 

A compiliation as nice as this makes me wish Atari had never auctioned off the IP for BATTLE ZONE, which definitely belongs in a package of this nature. I will also say that on a modern high-refresh gaming monitor, vector emulation is getting pretty good. Tempest, Asteroids/Asteroids Deluxe, Quadrun, etc. all look very nice. Not as good as a a real vector screen, but not as expensive as keeping a vector monitor running(or dealing with phosphor burnout and fatigue either). 

[+MrFish]

Paltry representation of the 8-bit computers (along with other systems there); and yeah, two slots for Big 5 Software out of 5 titles? Also... why is Food Fight there instead of... literally hundreds of other better titles?

 

[mimo]

13 minutes ago, MrFish said:

Paltry representation of the 8-bit computers (along with other systems there); and yeah, two slots for Big 5 Software out of 5 titles? Also... why is Food Fight there instead of... literally hundreds of other better titles?

 

And the 7800 version of food fight is better anyway.

Bit disappointed in the 800 games.

 

[Mclaneinc]

It's weird, the dev, Digital Eclipse have loads of these retro compilations under their belt, the main guy, Jeff Vasasor (think that's his last name) normally gets a good selection, I guess that maybe the choices were made elsewhere.

 

The feel of the app is good, but some weird choices

Edited November 12, 2022 by Mclaneinc

[+DrVenkman]

Game choices are entirely IP/rights based, as well as an attempt at variety. Licenses aren’t free, kids.

[+MrFish]

1 minute ago, DrVenkman said:

Licenses aren’t free, kids.

License fees are their problem. I'm rating the choices objectively, not by how difficult it is for them to obtain licenses.

 

[+DrVenkman]

2 minutes ago, MrFish said:

License fees are their problem. I'm rating the choices objectively, not by how difficult it is for them to obtain licenses.

 

Your subjective opinion does not quality as “objective.” 

[+MrFish]

25 minutes ago, mimo said:

And the 7800 version of food fight is better anyway.

The 8-bit version is a decent enough game, but nothing to rate the system by.

 

Yeah, the 7800 version is better, generally because the 8-bit version is in character mode, and does nothing to compensate for it (character bit-shifting, etc.).

 

[bfollowell]

41 minutes ago, MrFish said:

Paltry representation of the 8-bit computers (along with other systems there); and yeah, two slots for Big 5 Software out of 5 titles? Also... why is Food Fight there instead of... literally hundreds of other better titles?

 

 

Yeah, and why the heck is Star Raiders under the 5200 instead of the 8-bit section?! I mean, as close as the two were, I guess they look pretty much identical, but I never had a 5200, so I didn't play it on there, and with those analog controllers, I have no idea how close this one will be to what I remember on the 8-bit. All-in-all, the 8-bit section was pretty paltry. It's also hard to believe that games like Wolfenstein, Doom, and AvP were left off the Jaguar section, but I'm sure that was due to licensing issues.

 

[+MrFish]

8 minutes ago, DrVenkman said:

Your subjective opinion does not quality as “objective.” 

Alright, I'll phrase it another way for you: I'm judging the quality of selections on their own merits, rather than how difficult they were to obtain licenses for.

 

[Mclaneinc]

I know people can think, "its a 40yr old game, what's with this license crap", but this is being published to make cash so why shouldn't the license owners get a little share as well as the publishers of the comp...

Edited November 12, 2022 by Mclaneinc

[+MrFish]

32 minutes ago, Mclaneinc said:

so why shouldn't the license owners get a little share...

And with only 5 titles, "little" is exactly what the 8-bit license owners are going to get (as a group).

 

[+DrVenkman]

30 minutes ago, MrFish said:

And with only 5 titles, "little" is exactly what the 8-bit license owners are going to get (as a group).

 

So? You’re obviously not a fan (as a “serious computerist”) so what difference does it make to you?  

[Atariboy]

2 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

It's weird, the dev, Digital Eclipse have loads of these retro compilations under their belt, the main guy, Jeff Vasasor (think that's his last name) normally gets a good selection, I guess that maybe the choices were made elsewhere.

 

The feel of the app is good, but some weird choices

That was the old Digital Eclipse. The remnants of the studio were shuttered sometime around 2010, give or take a year or so (And it had lost its name a bit before that, with late projects during the PS3/360 era like Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection not going under the Digital Eclipse name).

 

Today's Digital Eclipse is the result of purchasing the name when Foundation 9 went out of business not long after 2012's Midway Arcade Origins appeared (Which despite being an arcade collection relying on Digital Eclipse source code, was developed elsewhere in the family since the studio was already shut down). It was used to brand a new development studio as.

 

Several names associated with the old Digital Eclipse work with today's company that started up circa 2014/2015 (Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 was their first product), including the guy that runs the show. They also operate out of the building that the old development house worked out of. 

 

But Jeff Vavasour and I believe some other names familiar to those that have paid attention to the credits in various original Digital Eclipse compilations work at Code Mystics. Jeff started Code Mystics in I believe 2009 after having left Digital Eclipse a couple of years earlier (perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall for classic game emulation at Foundation 9?).

 

I think not a lot of folks realize that Digital Eclipse were two distinct studios with a lengthy gap between the two iterations of it. 

 

7 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

Not sure what you mean but some 2600 games are locked, so that probably means there won't be extra games.

 

I didn't check every game one by one, but compared the number of games per machine, and that's how I discovered Warbirds was missing. It's not on the Steam list above either.

Since based off your comment above I'm unsure if you have, have you checked a version of this collection yourself and personally confirmed it to be absent? Checking every game could refer to doing a 1:1 comparison of the game list on each platform or going through the collection in-person on your system of choice, so I'm not sure.

 

If you've not personally confirmed the absence of it, I'm thinking that rather than having spotted a missing game that you've instead spotted a mistake made with the game list that's being published such as on the Steam page for Atari 50. I think it simply was inadvertently left off the list since like I said last night, Warbords has appeared in a variety of Atari 50 impressions videos since release.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Atariboy

[+MrFish]

26 minutes ago, DrVenkman said:

So? You’re obviously not a fan (as a “serious computerist”) so what difference does it make to you?  

You mean as in "Fanboy"/"Fanboi"? No, I'm more objective than that...

 

I'll have my "Gaming Computerist" site up, someday; I have the grayed-out placeholder to prove it. And, just to be honest, all the 8-bit computer titles in this collection will be included on the site. None of the titles are bad (they're all A or B grade), there's just too few of them to represent the system here.

 

Edited November 12, 2022 by MrFish

[Mclaneinc]

1 hour ago, Atariboy said:

That was the old Digital Eclipse. The remnants of the studio were shuttered sometime around 2010, give or take a year or so (And it had lost its name a bit before that, with late projects during the PS3/360 era like Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection not going under the Digital Eclipse name).

 

Today's Digital Eclipse is the result of purchasing the name when Foundation 9 went out of business not long after 2012's Midway Arcade Origins appeared (Which despite being an arcade collection relying on Digital Eclipse source code, was developed elsewhere in the family since the studio was already shut down). It was used to brand a new development studio as.

 

Several names associated with the old Digital Eclipse work with today's company that started up circa 2014/2015 (Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 was their first product), including the guy that runs the show. They also operate out of the building that the old development house worked out of. 

 

But Jeff Vavasour and I believe some other names familiar to those that have paid attention to the credits in various original Digital Eclipse compilations work at Code Mystics. Jeff started Code Mystics in I believe 2009 after having left Digital Eclipse a couple of years earlier (perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall for classic game emulation at Foundation 9?).

 

I think not a lot of folks realize that Digital Eclipse were two distinct studios with a lengthy gap between the two iterations of it. 

 

Thanks for the detailed explanation, I mentioned Jeff's name because I swear I saw it flash up during the credits at one point (on the older work his name was front and centre). I loved all their old work on the PS1 and xbox etc. The emulated code was always pretty tight and the info bountiful, usually. Was a nice surprise to see their name pop up on loading.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Mclaneinc