Atari will not give up.................... but Nintendo could care less
Written: Sep 27 '01 (Updated Sep 21 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Ms. Pac Man, Food Fight, Galaga, and other early eighties classics.
Cons: Karate Ka, Double Dragon, Ikari Warriors, and so many others.
The Bottom Line: A great list of classic games that are superior to their 2600 counterparts but don't expect anything too advance.
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| StarSoldier1's Full Review: Atari 7800 |
Atari 7800 Prosystem (1987-1990)
The Atari 7800 prosystem is a 8-bit game machine that has near perfect arcade translations of older arcade games like Ms. Pac Man, Galaga, Asteriods and Dig Dug, but also has lousy ports newer arcade titles like Ikari Warriors, Xenophone, and Double Dragon. The Atari name was still poison after the Great Video Game Crash of 1984 that was caused by Atari's multi-million failures like Atari Pac Man and E.T. for the Atari 2600, which killed off the entire Video Game industry. The Atari 7800 got destroyed by new comer Nintendo and their NES powerful 8-bit game machine in the late eighties.
Unlike the NES though the Atari 7800 games always seem to work on the first try mainly because it was an top loader system, as oppose to the box-like design found on the NES. I never had to clean my 7800 games like I had to with my NES games because the circuit boards were always well protected in the Atari cartridge cases. If you get bored with the 7800 games then you can always play the Atari 2600 games on your Atari 7800 because it's one of the first machines ever to feature backwards play similar to the successful PlayStation 2. Now you can play over 1,000 games on one machine!
Sadly there is no game on the Atari 7800 quite as good some of the NES and Sega Master System games out there like Super Mario Bros. 3, The Guardian Legend, Final Fastasy, Y's The Vanished Omen, Phantasy Star, and many more mainly because the Atari 7800 games are just too arcadey and they don't have any save features like battery back up or passwords either.
The controllers for the 7800 are way too weird and its hard to get a good decent grip on the analog stick and I don't like how the action buttons are on opposite sides of the controller. There were also other NES-like controllers for the 7800 but they were only released in Europe, so we were out of luck.
The common 7800 games:
Centipede
Pole Position II
Asteriods
Xevious
Dig Dug
Ms. Pac Man
The rare 7800 games:
Rampage
Motor Psycho
Ikari Warriors
Commando
Double Dragon
Sentidel (Europe)
Final Run
Starsoldier's Top Ten
("Food Fight was good, trust me!")
#1 FOOD FIGHT
It's very goofy arcade-like fun. In the game you guide the kid with the big head over to the ice cream cone on the left side of the screen before it melts and those evil kitchen chefs will try everything to stop you from getting it, even throw food at you. Fortunately for you, your hero can throw food too. Food Fight is a very original and arcade like game and it's only for the 7800 too!
#2. MS. PAC MAN
This is a very good translation of one of the coolest arcade video games ever, almost perfect (why are the dots blue?) with a new level select option and 5 lives to start. This is a good reason to have a 7800!
#3. DIG DUG
This is a near perfect arcade version of the dirty Namco classic. Also the graphics look great and the sounds aren't too bad either.
#4. GALAGA
Galaga is a great classic shoot em up by Namco from 1981.
It's a little slower than the arcade or NES versions, but it's mostly all here.
#5. JOUST
A good version of the medieval arcade game plus it's 2 players as well.
6. DONKEY KONG JR.
7. DARK CHAMBERS
8. POLE POSITION II
9. DONKEY KONG
10. ROBOTRON 2084
Disappointing: KARATEKA
Worst: KARATEKA
Underrated: FOOD FIGHT
Atari 7800 Overall:
Less than a hundred 7800 games were made for this system, and it depresses me to even talk about it, but hey, at least it backward compatible with the Atari 2600 games (but not the Atari 5200 games unfortunately), that alone makes it worth buying.
Rating: 56/100 good.... just not NES good.
RARE SCALE: 6/10 a tougher find than the 2600 but not the 5200, if you see one in a discount store you'll may never see another one again.
StarSoldier1 (Ryan Genno)
http://www.videogames101.com
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: Ryan Genno
Reviews written: 284
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