A great machine marred by horrible controllers
Written: Aug 23 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great graphics; fantastic sound; wonderful games
Cons: Those awful controllers
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| HawgWyld's Full Review: Colecovision |
I still have my little brother's old Colecovision that he got right before the famed "video game crash" of 1984. This system was the most advanced of its time -- great graphics, wonderful sound, expandability and more. However, it also came with some of the most rotten controllers ever made. As much as I love the Colecovision, I can't get past the awful controllers.
Coleco wasn't the only company that never got the hang of making controllers that were worth a damn. The things packed with the Colecovision, in fact, rival those miserable Atari 5200 analog controllers in terms of pathetic, idiotic design.
A Colecovision controller, for those who don't know, is a long, rectangular black box with a numeric keypad, a fire button on each side and a squattish joystick with a big, clumsy knob on top of it. The controller doesn't fit my hand comfortably and offers slow, erratic and unreliable control. Games for this system that require precision control aren't a whole lot of fun -- that's a shame, because a decent set of controllers would have made this system a heck of a lot more fun.
Once you get past the controllers, though, you discover that the Colecovision is a darn fine system. The thing was controlled by an eight-bit, Z-80A CPU running at 3.58 MHz, and had four sound channels. The graphics on this system were better than those on other systems of the day, and the system had some fantastic games available for it.
The system came packed with Nintendo's Donkey Kong, which was all the rage in the arcades when this system arrived in 1982. It looked and sounded a lot like the arcade game, but only had three of the four levels that came on the stand-up game. That didn't matter much at the time, though -- that was a more "complete" translation than most arcade games that were ported to home systems.
As for games, Colecovision was appealing to me because it went for translations of games that were, for the most part, not as well known as the more popular titles of the day. Some of the better games for this system are Pepper II, Mr. Do, Looping, Zaxxon, Turbo and Ladybug. Those titles weren't always the most popular arcade games, but they were a heck of a lot of fun to play, and translated well to the Colecovision.
In terms of controllers, there were plenty available for the Colecovision -- there was a track ball, a driving controller that went with Turbo and a "super" controller that was better than the standard controller, but is hard to find these days.
The game was also easily "upgraded" due to an expansion port that accepted specially-designed hardware. The most popular product made to fit that port, seemingly, was one that accepted Atari 2600 cartridges. That's right -- one system could have about the most games available for it as it could play both 2600 carts and those for the Colecovision. The Colecovision library, by the way, wasn't too shabby in that there were a number of games available for it.
For those "retrogamers" in the house who are looking for systems to collect, bear in mind that Colecovision stuff is readily available on auction sites such as eBay and Yahoo!, and that stuff generally pretty cheap. I should probably get on the Internet and get some better controllers for my system, but I'm too busy collecting NES, Atari 7800 and Atari 2600 stuff (sorry, Colecovision fans -- I'll get to your favorite system one of these days).
I hope I'm not being too harsh on this old system, as I do love it. I just hate those controllers and think they really helped prevent this system from living up to its potential. Another bad thing about this system is that Coleco, like many other companies that made video games, was hell bent on figuring out how to turn that system into a computer. The Adam add-on became available for the Colecovision eventually, and sold like wild. It was also a horrible system, so it almost drove Coleco to bankruptcy and hastened the demise of the Colecovision. That was too bad.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
HawgWyld
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 - Top 200 |
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Member: Ethan C. Nobles
Location: Benton, Ark.
Reviews written: 1434
Trusted by: 495 members
About Me:
The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient.
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