The Occasional Coder - Confession: Atari Keychain Games

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This is a little "general audiences" for AA, but if you missed this review I wrote and linked to from the forums, here you go:

 

I have a fascination with tiny computers; I had a pocketable Tandy PC-3 back in the '80s, worked on games for PalmOS, and am still trying to make my Zaurus useful. And I'm a classic gaming fan, with a modest collection of a hundred-odd Atari VCS (a.k.a. 2600) games on cartridge. So, tiny game systems shaped like the original Atari controllers? For me, almost irresistible.

 

A company called "Basic Fun" recently released three different Atari-branded "keychain games." They're tiny, nearly perfect replicas of Atari controllers that plug into TV inputs and play actual video games. Despite having been warned about poor quality by this thread on AtariAge, and despite the personal attacks made by Basic Fun against an Atari Flashback engineer, I cautiously inquired about the store's return policy, then bought both the Joystick and the Paddle versions, to see for myself.

 

At first, I couldn't figure out how to get the games to power on. The switch on the external battery pack didn't seem to do anything, but this had been reported in the forum, so I tried squeezing gently and pressing the switch firmly past the "on" position. I'm not really sure what did the trick, but now the battery pack I'm using for both games (they're interchangable) seems to work consistently well.

 

The paddle game was the first I was able to power up. It includes Pong (never a release for the Atari 2600; the closest VCS game was Video Olympics), Breakout, and Warlords. None of these games are the originals you remember from your childhood; the device isn't Atari-compatible - heretically, it's actually a Nintento on a chip! So, these are "play-alike" facsimiles, and the sounds, colors, graphics, and gameplay are all off. Pong is as pong does; it's classic and hard to screw up. This version of Breakout gets fast too fast, has problems with collision detection, and just seems sloppier than the original. The best of the three is Warlords. Aside from the lack of multiplayer play which made it great, Warlords is also missing the "boomerang" shots that made up somewhat for its lack of anything but 45° angles, but otherwise it's a reasonable representation of the game, and fun to play. Finally, at least on my unit, the button doesn't register unless you press it at the bottom, and quite firmly, which is a bit unnatural. Luckily, button responsiveness isn't critical for any of the included games.

 

Despite the fun of paddle games, that controller just isn't the icon that the Atari VCS joystick was - and remains today. The miniaturized joystick is terribly cute, with a soft rubber dome around the stick just like the original. Bizarrely, its cable - unlike the paddle's - connects to the "bottom" of the joystick (the side facing you), rather than its traditional place at the top. The games (Centipede and Yar's Revenge) are both poor imitations of the real thing, but have a little less redeeming value than the paddle games. Centipede's graphics are even more lackluster than the 2600 version, and Yar's Revenge loses a lot of its excitement. This is especially noticeable when the bad guy explodes; the sound and visual effects are a choppy, half-muted, un-dazzling replacement for the original's blaze of visual and audible noise, and for some reason you're not allowed to fly around - I miss doing victory swoops! The games don't seem to progress correctly either, with fleas arriving much too soon in Centipede, and Yar's Revenge never really getting much harder than it starts out.

 

The joystick itself also has significant problems. Unlike the simple potentiometer of the paddle, it's made up of four different switches that are pressed by tabs on the edge of the broad disc at the base of the stick, requiring proper alignment. I've found two basic problems with the joystick. In my first game of Yar's Revenge, I felt an uncomfortable "pop" in the stick, and it stuck in one direction, and wouldn't quite go back to standing straight, preferring to stay off-center each time I pushed it in a new direction - the tabs were getting caught in the rubber dome. Then, having tried to straighten it out, it started failing to register my movements - the tabs had become misaligned.

 

I've managed to mostly correct these problems by taking the joystick completely apart, hacking a roughly 1/8" (3mm) thick, 5/8" (1.6cm) diameter disc with a 1/4" (6mm) hole in its center from a block of dense packing foam, and inserting it on top of the base of the stick, between the base and the dome. This holds the dome up off of the four square, sharp-edged tabs on the base, preventing them from getting caught in it. It also keeps the four tabs in their very shallow channels, so that the stick doesn't rotate out of alignment with the directional buttons on the PCB. It would probably also help to smooth the tops of the tabs. The whole problem could have been avoided by Basic Fun if they had made the base of the joystick tent-shaped instead of flat, with the tabs pointing down at angles instead of straight out, and had made them self-aligning by adding more solid, broader, angled channels leading to the buttons. Or, you know, if they'd put something between the tabs and the dome, like I did.

 

I wish I could recommend these toys for the games, but I can't. If you want to reconnect with childhood memories or introduce your own kids to Atari gaming, and you don't want to mess with finding a working original system and individual cartridges on eBay, get the Atari Flashback 2.0, a much nicer product that lets two players play over forty games. It lists for the same price as two of these keychain games (which together would only play five games), provides almost exactly the same game experiences you had as a kid, and it can even be modified to play original cartridges. That's because the FB2 is an Atari-on-a-chip, almost completely compatible with the original.

 

If Basic Fun had used the same chip that's in the FB2, and fixed the joystick problems I mentioned, they could have built an amazing portable tribute to the best-loved video game system of my generation. As it is, they're nostalgic keychains with the novelty of playing imitation games that are capable only of reminding you of the real classics. If it's enough for you to have a tiny token of the early days of video games, the joysticks are nice looking replicas that you can hang on your backpack's zipper pull.

 

I'll let you know how mine holds up.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=1959