Odyssey 2: Under Appreciated?

[+swlovinist]

The Odyssey 2 was my first complete set of games.  I really enjoyed the simplicity and arcade style games it had.  Pic Axe Pete, K.C. Muchkin, Freedom Fighters, Turtles, and Smithereens were favorites.  The homebrew market has been fun to collect too.    Agree that the US market was limited, but is nice to have a small selection of games to focus on and play.  

 

[Zonie]

I have one. Saw a boxed one in a thrift years back pretty cheap so I bought it. I had a friend who had one and we played K.C. Munchkin for hours. Otherwise, the console sort of sucked and doesn't really interest me. I have a bunch of carts, including Both KC's.

One thing I noticed is that BOXED O2 and Intellivision consoles seem to be much more common than Atari consoles. Even the carts. It's like people regarded them better back in the day.

[R.Cade]

It has a certain charm that may be lost on someone who never played it back in the 70's. And yes, they do always seem to be boxed. Isn't that odd? Maybe it's because the packaging is glossy and fancy, so people didn't throw them away? At least with the cartridges, it is sort of a case, unlike Atari games.

 

That leads me to a really odd realization. I have dated more than a couple girls/women who had Odyssey 2's as a child. This includes my wife.. and I inherited the system from her parents.

 

It seems strange that I attracted, or was attracted to, former Odyssey 2 owners. I never had one- My first "game machine" was a Radio Shack Pong clone, then a VIC-20.

 

Edited January 17, 2021 by R.Cade

[+x=usr(1536)]

13 hours ago, Zonie said:

One thing I noticed is that BOXED O2 and Intellivision consoles seem to be much more common than Atari consoles. Even the carts. It's like people regarded them better back in the day.

 

Possibly, but Odyssey² boxes were apparently made out of material that could withstand being on the surface of the sun.  Mine's 42 years old and while it shows some of the signs of its age, it's pretty much indestructible.

[Zonie]

Yeah, there is that. The Early Atari Gatefolds were too. I have my original 01 Combat and Sears Outer Space. If they were all like that, I'd still have them all.

 

[Turbo-Torch]

I bought my 2600 when I was 11.  I have older sisters that were married, so I had brother-in-laws and they loved my Atari.

My one brother-in-law decided he was finally going to take the plunge and buy his own Atari system and asked me to go along to the mall with him.  There was this cool dark edgy stereo store called Playback that we went to and the game systems were in the back.  2600 was $199, Intellivision was something my $249 and then there was the Odyssey 2 for $179, and that price caught his eye.  In addition to the cheaper price, the salesman told him he could choose 3 free games of his choice and that sealed the deal.  I didn't know anyone who owned the system, had a bad gut feeling about it and tried talking him out of it, but it didn't do any good.  Total of 4 games with the pack in, fancy looking joysticks and an impressive keyboard...I was having seconds thoughts that this thing may be better than my Atari.

 

He liked it, as did my nephew (just 4 years younger than me and like a kid brother).  I noticed right away that all the games were borrowing from a fixed character set and the sounds were limited.  Alien Invaders Plus was one of the games he chose, it was good, but nowhere near as good as 2600 Space Invaders.  Games like Bowling/Baskeball were just sad, yet football was way better than the initial 2600 version.

 

Then came the day he bought KC Munchkin (while the Atari world was still waiting in anticipation for Pac-Man to be released).  Till today, KC Munchkin is in my top 5 favorite video games.  Fast action, cute animated Munchkin, great sound, no flicker, moving dots, multiple mazes AND you can create your own mazes!

Months later 2600 Pac-Man comes out and I was ready as I had the money saved up.  Bought it on release day and was so disappointed.  If it weren't for the box and manual showing the game screen, I would have thought I bought a broken game.

 

Then he got another phenomenal game called UFO.  Not only could I shoot the UFOs, but I also had shields that allowed me ram them.  UFOs combine and can track you.  Then the killer chain reaction domino effect of exploding UFOs.  Screw Asteroids, this game upped it 10X over.

 

Pick Axe Pete is another awesome game that I found fun and highly addictive.  Attack of the Timelord might be a bit better than Astrosmash, and Freedom Fighters was also fun.

 

For me, the system has nostalgia because I played the heck out of it bitd and the games I mentioned above make it worth owning.  Back in the 90s when thrift stores were full of 2600, 5200, Intellivision and Colecovision consoles, the O2 was almost non existent, and the few I found were roach motels.  About 20 years ago I picked one up on eBay for next to nothing and it included The Voice.  Yeah, a voice module is also something I always wanted for my 2600 back then and it never happened.

 

Of course the O2 was never any competition for the 2600, but it's far from a worthless system that many make it out to be.

 

[sn8k]

I have no desire to ever even try one. I always thought it sucked hard.

[Keatah]

BITD I had VCS, Intellivision, and Odyssey² as my first cartridge consoles. Played them all about 40/40/20 respectively. Enjoyed the Odysssey for what it was. We were way too young to appreciate the engineering features and tradeoffs that were present in these old consoles. But we tried.

 

Our childish engineering analysis consisted of cracking open a given console and checking to see how many big(40), medium(24-28), small(14-18), and tiny(8) chips there were. We'd count the number of chips and the number of pins and plug it into this elaborate BASIC program which gave us a ranking of how smart the console was. A relative ranking if multiple consoles were evaluated at once.

 

I only disliked the cart boxes. Had too many "!" in the descriptions. And the artwork was loud with the same color scheme from box to box. Whereas Intv and VCS boxes were color coded and it was easy to find the "red box" for Space Battle or Combat. Same applied to the cartridge labels.

 

O² had a place in our electronic gaming experiences. And we loved its futuristic look.