Overdue1

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Ok, so that's the intro for this entry. I did this last weekend. Hooking up my dad's old Atari to an LCD TV. It was truly amazing how easy it was to start playing with it. Just connect a few wires... Ok, A LOT of wires... and then (the best part) plug in the cartridge and the game pops up on screen! You know why this is impressive? Because the Micro Genius cartridges needed a lot of wind power to make it work! (or so the legends say)

But seriously, you have ANY idea how old this thing is?! The friggin box says 1980. 1980 dammit! And the cartridges are just plug and play! Micro Genius punya cartridge, baru beli pun nak kena main2 sikit position dia, baru boleh main.

Ok, first the basics. That's the console there on the left. And then there's 2 basic joysticks on the right. The joysticks are not built for comfort and have only one button each. Note all those messy wires. Crazy. Good thing current-gen consoles fixed that issue. That small lens-upwards camera is a different type of controller. It's a dial with a button on its side, for a specific driving game.

This one. More details coming up.

And these are the cartridges. Some cartridges have a few games with multiple variants. For example the "Combat" cartridge has about 15 slightly different varieties of tank battle games. Varieties include: bouncing bullet, invisible tank and different maps. Also includes an aircraft dogfight game shown in the third photo from the top. That variant was a bit unfair, as it is 3 small fighters against one big... "bomber" aircraft? Rate of fire and size was about the same, just that the fighters shoot 3 bullets at once.

The "Indy 500" cartridge (which I must say, has quite an awesome cover art), has a few race tracks and its slippery terrain variants. Besides that, it also has a "collect the small square dots" game in which we must race around the place collecting small square dots, avoiding the bigger ones that will slow us down. Konon2 grass.

In "Air Sea Battle" (the one labelled "Atari Hin Seng". I don't know why.), you are either mobile turrets on the ground or flying aircrafts, attacking targets either above or below you. In "Super Breakout", well, this is pretty much one of the older forms of the game where you control a bar/stick left and right at the bottom of the screen, making balls bounce upwards and breaking brick walls. But the cover art is also awesome!

"Slot Racers" is just crap and I shall not bother explaining it.

The games are pretty much "get the higher score". Which... is... still pretty much the basics of competitive multiplayer games now.

Me and my younger brother played around with it for less than an hour before packing it up and storing it back under my bed.