Atari's Paddles

[Great Hierophant]

Having played with the paddles finally, I'm not sure I like them very much. I won't deny that they have big knobs, smooth motion and come in economical pairs, but the actual paddle mechanics don't impress me. The paddle has a range of movement of roughly 330 degrees. I would say that from 0-20 degrees and 170-330 degrees there is no registered response from any game. These huge dead-zones unnaturally increase the difficulty of a game. You twist the knob a little to far to the left and you are in dead zone land while the ball slips by your paddle. I can imagine that the Atari's low horizontal resolution of 160 pixels does not facilitate fine movement of the paddles.