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ATARI
5200 |
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A cutting-edge 80's console
with an Achille's
Heel. | |
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HISTORY
The year
is 1982. A new generation of game
consoles is on the horizon, and the Atari 2600 is no
longer enough to satisfy gamers looking for an authentic
arcade experience. Eager to stay competitive,
Atari responds with the 5200, a powerful console based
on the industry leader's line of home computers.
However, the console is cursed with a series of design
flaws, ranging from a cumbersome analog controller to an
RF adapter that doubled as a power supply. These
faults and a dull pack-in game leave the 5200 at a
disadvantage against its lead competitor, the
ColecoVision. However, the 5200 would get
another shot at fame when its hardware would
be resurrected as the XEGS in 1987. The awful
controller... would remain in the past where it
belonged. |
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TECH SPECS
| PROCESSOR |
Custom 6502C |
| CLOCK
SPEED |
1.79MHz |
| SYSTEM
RAM |
16K |
| MEDIA
FORMAT |
cartridges,
max 32K |
| SOUND |
POKEY, 4
channels |
| GRAPHICS |
ANTIC &
GTIA chips |
| RESOLUTION |
320x192 |
| COLORS |
256 (16 per
scanline) |
| MAX
SPRITES |
4 players, 4
missiles |
| MAX
POLYS |
N/A |
| I/O PORTS |
2/4
controllers, expansion, RF video,
AC | |
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THE DREADNAUGHT
FACTOR: Next, on the Dreadnaught
Factor! An exciting bombing raid over an
immense battle cruiser the size of Bill
O'Reilly's head! |
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MEGAMANIA: It's the
same great shooter that it was on the Atari 2600,
but with greatly enhanced visuals. Whaddaya
know, those things really WERE
hamburgers! |
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MOUNTAIN
KING: A fun, fast-paced action
game that challenges the player to snag a crown at
the bottom of the screen, then carry it to the top
before it vanishes. |
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MOON
PATROL: Ooh, ooh, ooh! Moon
Patrol! Leap over craters, blast some
UFOs! Wait, that jingle was for another
game, huh? That's OK, it works just as well
with this one! |
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WIZARD OF
WOR: Contrary to popular belief,
Wizard of Wor on the 5200 isn't a perfect
arcade port. However, it IS close enough
that it hardly matters. | |
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FROGGER: Run, don't
hop, from this heinous game based on the Sega
arcade hit. Or was it Konami's arcade
hit? After all these years, I'm still not
sure! |
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GALAXIAN: Holy
conflict of interest, Batman! Why is the
version of Galaxian that Atari released for
the ColecoVision so much better than this
one? |
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JOUST: Wow,
Atari. Was this really the best you could do
on the 5200? Somehow, I doubt it. The
gameplay is actually a step DOWN from
its cousin on the 2600! |
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Q*BERT: It looks
fine. It sounds all right. So what's
the problem here? The problem is that the
control in this port totally bites... and
that stupid stock controller is to
blame! |
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SUPER
BREAKOUT: This must have been a
super letdown to early 5200 adopters who expected
a cutting-edge gaming experience from their
purchase. | |
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Like Sega's Saturn, the Nintendo 64, or the third
Playstation, the Atari 5200 holds the dubious
distinction of being the first game console to weaken
the dominance of a former industry leader. It's also the
first game system that was undone by an overzealous
marketing department. Originally based
on the hardware used in the Atari 400 computer, Atari
made the dreadful mistake of anchoring the system to a
proprietary controller so awful, it must have flown out
of Pandora's box with all the other
demons.
However, once you've moved beyond the mushy,
non-centering, oversized, numeric keypad-wielding
disaster (or better yet, replaced it with something
usable), you'll find that the Atari 5200 wasn't entirely
deserving of the reputation that haunts it to this very
day. In
many ways, it's better suited to playing video games
than its more popular competitor, the ColecoVision, with
specialized hardware that can smoothly scroll playfields
and display over a hundred onscreen colors. Its cousins in
the Atari computer line prove just how incredible the
5200 could have been, if only Atari had stood by it
rather than dumping the system for the decidedly less
impressive Atari 7800 in 1984.
Unlike most children of the 80's, my own
experience with the Atari 5200 was a favorable one. That had a lot
to do with the fact that I had a suitable alternative to
the horrendous controllers included with the unit. The system I
constantly borrowed from a friend- then eventually
purchased- had that holy grail of 5200 accessories, the
Wico Command Control. Thanks to the
included Y-cable, this candy red joystick could play
everything the stock controller could, only better. It had both the
versatility of analog and the razor-sharp precision and
arcade feel of digital, putting it a quantum leap ahead
of nearly every controller available in the early
1980's.
Without the albatross of the fiendish stock
controller around my neck, I was free to enjoy the
system to its fullest. The Atari 5200
was a true evolution of the console that started it all,
with the same vibrant color as the Atari 2600 but a
vastly improved sound chip, more detailed visuals, and
enough memory for arcade conversions that left nothing
to the imagination. Although the
upstart NES was well out of my price range in 1986, I
didn't feel like I was missing out, because what I had
was already better than what had come before
it.
Eventually, I did buy that NES. Then that was
replaced by a Sega Genesis. Eventually, the
Atari 5200 was trampled by the march of time, and the
system that served me so well through the mid 1980's was
sold to make room and money for other consoles. However, that
seperation would not last forever. The
impulsiveness of my youth eventually made way for the
nostalgic pangs of a man who longed to reclaim it. One trip to eBay
and a week's wait later, I was reunited with the console
that devoured so many of my rainy childhood
afternoons... and it was just as much fun as it was when
I was twelve!
Here now are reviews of the Atari 5200 games that
I enjoyed as a child, along with the titles that I've
only recently added to my collection.
NEW GAMES:
Beamrider
Defender
Star Trek: Strategic
Ops
Star Wars: The Arcade
Game
Zaxxon
Collectors are going to want this complete
in the box... as much effort was put into the
instruction manual as the game itself, and you're really
going to miss out if you don't read Ballblazer's
surprisingly deep science-fiction backstory and view the
illustrations of your wedge-shaped ship and whimsical
alien competitors.
You also won't know how to start the game itself,
which as you might imagine is kind of important! Ballblazer is
best described as a futuristic game of soccer, played
from within the cockpit of a hovercraft. Your "rotofoil"
must scoop up a ball on a checkered court, then fire it
between two glowing goal posts to score points. There's also a
touch of basketball in the play mechanics, with more
points scored for long-distance shots. Unlike soccer or
basketball, Ballblazer is strictly mano-a-mano; an
understandable compromise when you consider how hard the
game is pushing the 5200 hardware. The first-person
perspective, smooth character scaling, and
lightning-fast action makes Ballblazer a stunning visual
achievement on the system, and makes the single-member
teams easy to forgive. What's less
excusable is the disorienting gameplay... the limited
view of the playfield makes it tough to keep tabs on the
ball, and losing to the other player sends you in a
choppy, vertigo-inducing tailspin that puts your lunch
in jeopardy!
When an invading force seals Earth inside
an energy grid, you'll need to ride the glowing rails
high above the planet in search of the aliens
responsible. Your primary targets are the wily
white saucers that dance along the grid, but you'll also
have to deal with a variety of security droids that
block your shots and restrict your movement. Once
you've cleared the sector of saucers, a massive
mothership appears in the horizon... nail it with a
missile and you'll earn a huge bonus before advancing to
a more heavily guarded sector. The game gives you
a few stages to learn the ropes, then unleashes hell
upon you with an avalanche of aggressive
adversaries. By the time you reach the eighth
sector, you'll be begging for the yellow chirpers that
provide you with extra ships. Just make sure you
don't blast them by mistake when they finally make an
appearance!
This is one of the better versions of
Activision's overlooked shooter, but it suffers slightly
next to Beamrider on the ColecoVision due to the 5200's
low resolution. The blocky playfield just doesn't
sell the stark futuristic setting as well as the sharp
blue grid in the ColecoVision game. Also, the
sound effects are somewhat high-pitched, lacking the raw
impact that the snarling explosions had on other game
consoles. On the plus side, the gameplay is every
bit as good as it was on other systems, and unlike the
ColecoVision release, you've got an honest chance at
hitting the mothership in later
sectors.
A friend of mine used the term "tedious and
process-oriented" to describe an entirely different
game, Cosmic Chasm for the Vectrex. However, that
description works just as well for Blue Print, a
mindbendingly bizarre Japanese arcade game that was
first developed by Jaleco, then brought to the United
States by Midway.
Try to wrap your head around this... you're a
vaudeville performer, trying to rescue your buxom
bride-to-be from an evil Calfornia Raisin. Wait, wait, it
gets better... you have to burglerize houses to collect
leftover shoes, pressure cookers, and trumpets. Once you've
amassed enough junk, you can build a not-so-awesome mech
that fires basketballs at the grape rapist. By now, you're
on the verge of an aneurysm trying to make sense of all
this, so I'll just jump ahead to the review. You have to work
hard to enjoy Blue Print... the frantic action of most
arcade games has been replaced with memorization,
forcing you to think carefully while hunting down the
pieces you'll need to clobber the fruit at the top of
the screen.
It doesn't help matters much when an unstoppable
monster blocks the only entrance to the maze, and deadly
flowerpots plummet with the kind of uncanny accuracy
that defies the laws of physics. The game redeems
itself by being an extremely faithful conversion of a
very flawed coin-op... the suburbs in Blueprint are
dripping with rich color and ornate detail, and unlike
the 2600 version, every play mechanic and enemy (no
matter how aggravating) is left
intact.
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BUCK ROGERS |
  
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SEGA |
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SHOOTER |
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ATARI
5200 |
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Oh, Buck Rogers! Who could forget
your hokey science-fiction action? Your phallic
robots who talk like Mr. Spacely with laryngitis and
wear jewelry so gaudy it makes Flava Flav jealous? Or your saggy
stars who give the average viewer a whole new
appreciation for William Shatner? There's only one
thing about you that's easy to forget, and that's your
library of games.
The Genesis release by Electronic Arts was a long
and booooring turn-based RPG. The ColecoVision
cartridge looked like it was giving the system and
anyone who dared to play it a seizure. The "best" game
you've had to offer over the past twenty five years was
on the Atari 2600, and even that wasn't winning over
many shooter fans despite nifty 3D effects. You had a chance
to polish up that game when you brought it over to the
more powerful Atari 5200, but instead of broadening its
horizons, you somehow made it worse. Tight control
was the order of the day in the 2600 game, but the
next-generation release has the unwelcome addition of
inertia, making this interstellar slalom both monotonous
AND frustrating!
Sorry Buck, but as usual, your game
bidee-bidee-bidee-bites.
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CHOPLIFTER |
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ATARI |
DAN
GORLIN |
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ACTION/SHOOTER |
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ATARI
5200 |
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In
the early 1980's, Choplifter was a game with a lot of
promise but very little underlying substance. You'd fly behind
enemy lines, scoop up prisoners of war, then return them
to a base at the right side of the screen... and that
was pretty much it. A later Sega
arcade adaptation (and a subsequent Master System port)
would give the game everything that it was missing, but
those luxuries are absent from the Atari 5200 version of
Choplifter.
It's just you, the hostages, and a long
procession of tanks which have a knack of showing up at
the worst possible moments. It's a game
of patience rather than skill... you swoop down to grab
a few POWs, return to the skies to bomb the tank that's
crept up on you, and repeat the process until your
chopper is packed with people. Occasionally,
you'll see a jet fly past, but the pilot is such a
Spaceballs-caliber moron that he'll probably never hit
you with his payload of missiles. "Keep firing,
assholes!"
Anyway, if you like your intense shooters without
much intensity or shooting, you might want to look into
this one.
Otherwise, step up to the Master System version
of Choplifter... calling it an upgrade from the original
is like calling a Goodyear radial tire a slight step up
from a crudely chiseled stone wheel.
Caaaaaan... you... dig it? If you're
playing this conversion of the Namco arcade classic,
probably not.
Shockingly, Dig Dug on the Atari 5200 is even
wimpier than Atari's half-assed port of Joust! The graphics are
as dull as the dirt the hero drills through... instead
of the vibrant cartoon-quality visuals of the arcade
game, you get bland earth tones, tiny characters, and
limited detail.
More effort was put into the sound, but the music
is poorly synchronized with the action and the sound
effects lack the whimsy of the plummeting rocks and
inflating foes in the arcade game. The gameplay is
the best part of the package, but even that suffers
without important visual cues. The Pookas and
Fygars barely expand when they're stuck with Dig Dug's
air hose, making it difficult to tell if it's safe to
walk through them, or how much more air they can take
before they'll pop. This sucks all
the fun and strategy out of the game, leaving it a limp,
deflated shell of its former self.
Here's
an astonishingly close arcade conversion that's held
back by only one thing... the lack of the full-sized
instrument panel that intimidated even the most skilled
gamer back in 1981. Most of the challenge in
Defender come from mastering its two-way joystick and
myriad of buttons... without them, the game just isn't
the same.
Still,
the designers get plenty of credit for a port that
spares no details in its reproduction of Williams'
merciless side-scrolling shooter. A small jet of
flame erupts from your ship as you race to save the next
humanoid from abduction, and a diverse assortment of
foes crowd the screen, only to burst into cosmic
confetti as they're struck by your laser blasts.
There's even that brief moment before your ship explodes
when the game triples in speed. Why is it
there? What purpose does it serve? Nobody
knows... all that matters is that it was in the arcade
game, and it's here as well.
Although
its streamlined control ensures that the 5200 version of
Defender will never be as tough as the arcade version,
there's still plenty of challenge to be had in the
highest difficulty setting, where the Landers will stop
at nothing to strip your planet of life.
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One long-held belief among fans of
classic gaming is that the ColecoVision version of
Donkey Kong is extremely faithful to the arcade
game. This
recent 5200 port, adapted from the exceptional Atari
computer game, proves just how wrong they were. Although it
doesn't have the sharp resolution or the bright graphics
of its ColecoVision counterpart, Donkey Kong on the 5200
captures all the subtleties of the gameplay that were
missing from other ports... ports that quickly became
boring without them. It's not just
the inclusion of the cement factory round, either. It's the way
Mario earns bonus points for leaping over clusters of
barrels, the way he's got to strike fireballs directly
with the hammer to destroy them, and how the spring
forces you to watch your step in the elevator stage that
makes this conversion feel complete. It's also a lot
more challenging than other Donkey Kong translations,
with a massive flood of barrels in the iconic slanted
girder stage and vicious fireballs that won't rest until
YOU'VE been snuffed out! Sometimes the
game goes too far in stacking the odds against you...
the huge crowds of enemies make finishing later stages a
Herculean feat, and barrels rolling on the floor
above Mario will kill him if the hapless
carpenter's head brushes against them. Still, it's
refreshing to have a port of Donkey Kong that demands as
much from the player as it does
itself.
Do you loves you some bosses? Do you wish that
Gorf had consisted entirely of flagship stages? Do you buy every
Treasure game you can find, then complain whenever you
have to wade through a minute and a half of tiny ships
to reach that next screen-filling nemesis? Do your nipples
get hard when you hear the words "Warning... a giant
battleship approaches?" If so, you
should get a good therapist, or barring that, a copy of
The Dreadnaught Factor. In this
Activision shooter, all you fight are bosses, and
they're large enough to fill the first ten minutes of a
Star Wars movie!
They brake for nobody on their way to destroy
your puny planet, so it's up to you and your even punier
ship to put these behemoths out of commission with a
series of bombing raids. First, you'll
take out the engines of the Dreadnaught to halt its
progress, then you'll bomb the radiation vents,
resulting in a devastating nuclear explosion that
reduces the city-sized foe to space dust. The game starts
out slowly, and ends there on the lower difficulty
levels.
However, crank up the difficulty to five or six
and you'll get a more fitting challenge in the later
stages, where the Dreadnaughts are devilishly designed
and bristling with laser cannons and missile
launchers! Throw in smoothly scrolling graphics
and analog control that's essential to the gameplay
(rather than ruining it like in most 5200 shooters) and
you've got an experience that's REALLY
boss!
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FROGGER |
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PARKER
BROS. |
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ACTION |
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ATARI
5200 |
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Frogger
lost a lot of his slippery luster at the end of the
20th century, thanks mostly to a lame Playstation update
by Hasbro Interactive but also because Konami seems to
have no idea what to do with him.
Even Konami's direct conversions of the
arcade original always seem to be missing something, and
the less said about Frogger's Great Adventure, the
better.
However, things were different in the early
1980's. The
name "Frogger" was a mark of quality, and crummy ports
of the game for home consoles were few and far
between.
Unfortunately for Atari 5200 owners, they beat
the odds and got one of those ports. The game's
shabby graphics- as grungy as the rotting corpse of Kurt
Cobain and with a color palette only Stevie Wonder could
love- could be forgivable if it weren't for the
wretched, wretched gameplay. It lacks the
spontaneity of the coin-op thanks to a new control
scheme designed to accommodate the 5200's non-centering
controllers.
Rather than merely pushing the controller in any
direction to make your frog hop, you've got to hold the
fire button, THEN push the joystick in any direction,
THEN release the fire button to get moving. A severely pared
down soundtrack flattens, drowns, and devours what
little charm was left in this arcade conversion. Better luck next
time, Parker Bros.!
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GYRUSS |
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SHOOTER |
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ATARI
5200 |
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Other reviewers have complained about the
control in this game, but speaking as a guy who's
reached Earth in both the arcade and 5200 versions of
Gyruss, I had no trouble at all with it. It's simply a
matter of rolling the controller in a circular motion,
to the section of the playfield where you'd like the
ship to be.
If you can play Street Fighter II, you can easily
play the 5200 version of Gyruss. The only thing
about this otherwise fantastic conversion of the Konami
arcade hit that actually interferes with the gameplay is
the low resolution... the fleets of chunky, oversized
ships coupled with your ship's close proximity to the
center of the screen makes dodging more difficult than
it should be.
Those same enormous ships are much easier to hit
than they should be while resting in the center of the
playfield.
This balances the gameplay nicely, but also gives
this port an unwelcome feel of compromise. Chunky
resolution aside, this game is a lot more professional
than other early Gyruss conversions, with faithful
graphics and an outstanding reproduction of the Toccata
and Fugue in D Minor
soundtrack.
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JOUST |
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ATARI |
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ACTION |
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ATARI
5200 |
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Ew? Ew! Ewwwwwww! Geez, Atari,
what the hell happened here? Most of your
arcade ports for the Atari 5200 are great, but someone
must have been asleep at the ostrich reins when they
made this.
First of all, the graphics aren't so hot, with a
fair amount of detail in the floating platforms but
sprites that look as much like inkblots as vicious
buzzards.
They're only a faint improvement from the
monocolored characters in the Atari 2600 version, which
is not what you came for when you stepped up to the big
leagues of a next-generation console. My second gripe
(and it's sure to be yours as well) is that the flap
button produces exaggerated results. Sure, a ten
minute session of the arcade game is exhausting because
you spend so much time hammering that damned flap
button, and yes, the fire buttons on the 5200 controller
are so mushy and unresponsive that it was probably
necessary to make some adjustments. However, if
you're playing the game with a controller that's, you
know, GOOD, shooting halfway up the screen with a single
tap of flap is going to drive you mad. It's impossible
to carefully adjust your altitude with light taps, and
the manic fun of the arcade classic evaporates when
you're no longer required to fight with every ounce of
your will to stay in the sky and out of the reach of
those nasty buzzards. I could
criticize the limited animation, too, but I'd be beating
a dead pterodactyl... there are already more than enough
reasons to stay away from this botched
conversion.
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KANGAROO |
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ATARI |
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ACTION/PLATFORM |
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ATARI
5200 |
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"Ooh,
ooh, ooh!
Kangaroo!
Punch out a monkey, eat a piece of fruit!" Not only is this
jingle one of the best songs ever written, it perfectly
describes this side-view action game offered as the
5200's alternative to Donkey Kong. As a fiercely
maternal marsupial known only as "Mom," you've got to
scale to the top of a series of levels to rescue your
son, clobbering the pink primates in your path while
dodging their apples. Along the way,
you can gobble up fruit and ring a bell to call down
some more, leading the player to wonder, "Why does some
of the fruit give you points while the stuff the monkeys
throw knocks you out the moment it hits you?" This in turn
leads the player to the conclusion that it's
not fruit those monkeys are tossing at
you...
On a less scatalogical
note, Kangaroo is an extremely close conversion of a
flawed arcade game. You're forced to
tap up on the controller to bound over the gaping holes
in each level, which proves doubly frustrating when you
realize how little room for error the game allows. Get too close to
the edge of a platform and you'll plummet from it. Stand on solid
ground and you won't reach the next platform when you
leap for it.
The imprecise jumping and brutal level design
won't stop you from enjoying Kangaroo, but it does keep
the game from reaching the heights of its more
distinguished cousin Donkey Kong.
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