Launched final week on the Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Change, and Steam, Atari 50: The Anniversary Assortment comprises over 100 video games, and likewise “over an hour of unique video interviews with key gamers within the video games trade” (based on its website online). Forbes says the compilation “might be the perfect sport assortment ever made.” The Verge says the compilation is “large, detailed, and does an incredible job of explaining why these video games are so vital.”
However Ars Technica complains it is “full of historic filler.”
And but, “one new sport contained within the package deal will not let me go…” their reviewer provides. “I am speaking about Vctr Sctr, a retro-style arcade shooter that melds the addictive gameplay of classics like Asteroids and Tempest with fashionable gameplay ideas.”
As a package deal, Atari 50: The Anniversary Assortment units a brand new high-water mark for retro online game compilations. The gathering’s “timeline” characteristic deftly weaves archival supplies like design paperwork and manuals, explanatory context and modern quotes from the sport’s launch, and new video interviews with sport creators into an enticing, interactive journey by way of gaming historical past.
However whereas the presentation shines, the video games contained inside Atari 50 usually do not. Positive, there are a couple of actually replayable classics on supply right here, particularly within the video games from Atari’s superb arcade period. That stated, the majority of Atari 50’s collection of over 100 titles looks like filler that simply does not maintain up from a contemporary sport design perspective. Dozens of “basic” Atari video games — from 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe on the Atari 2600 to Missile Command 3D on the Jaguar — boil all the way down to mere historic curiosities that almost all fashionable gamers could be hard-pressed to tolerate for longer than a few minutes.
Then there’s Vctr Sctr, one among a handful of “reimagined” video games on Atari 50 that try to re-create the texture of a basic Atari title with fashionable {hardware} and design touches…. Extra than simply the look, Vctr Sctr does an amazing job capturing and updating what vector video games of the early arcade period felt wish to play.
Vctr Sctr apparently manages to mix up to date variations of Asteroids, Lunar Lander, , and Tempest (in more and more tough waves). The article notes it is simply one among six “reimagined” titles in Atari 50, however calls Vctr Sctr “an ideal brain-break sport, an excuse to disregard the surface world for a fast, distracting burst of centered, high-energy chaos.
“In that manner, it may be Atari 50’s finest demonstration of what the basic arcade period was actually like.”
