like I said, RETRO SALAD!!! I'm definitely getting my older brother the Atari one for Xmas....
RetroMania and Winter on the Moon
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 On 11/10/2014 at 02:02 AM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
This week I got caught up in retro mania by picking up not one, not two, but four Flashback consoles. I just couldn't help myself after seeing them all stacked there together on the shelf at Toys R Us. Then on Sunday I played a bunch of Borderlands The Pre-Sequel and had a lot of good luck freezing enemies solid and making it snow with freezing grenade clusters. The weather was a chilly wintry mix there on the Moon this week.
First the retro mania. After reading in Brett Weiss' book The 100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977-1987, that many of the games he mentioned (including some prototypes, sequels and 5200 and 7800 console variants) were on the various Atari Flashback consoles, I looked one up and discovered they were still making them, the latest being the Atari Flashback 5. Well, I ran out to Toys R Us to take a look and discovered the Genesis, Colecovision, and Intellivision consoles as well. I didn't even know there was a Colecovision and a Intellivision Flashback console. I thought a while about it and then dove in and got them all.
I'm really happy I have these now and that they are small enough to not take up too much space. I used to have all these orginal consoles and they were just too big to keep around in an apartment, so I gave them to my friend Mark. The downside with all but the Genesis is that you can't use cartridges and are stuck with the collections they give you, but that's ok because I have all the games on collections for Xbox/PS2 anyway. I just wanted the feel of the controllers and all that nostalgic goodness. I have yet to look closely at the games on each of these other than to see that Venture is on the Colecovision one and Frogs & Flies is on Atari one, two games I really like.
Some great features of these are: the ability to add periferals to the Atari Flashback 5, cartridges to Sega Genesis, and being able to play with the original controller design for both Colecovision and Intellivision. I immediately asked my friend Mark for an extra pair of paddle controllers for the Atari, an absolute must for games like Super Breakout, Kaboom!, and, of course, Night Driver.
Just for comparison, there's my Xbox 360 controller. That's getting close to forty years of separation shown there. Wow!
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is still going strong. Mark and I are playing co-op consistantly now on True Vault Hunter mode and trying out new gear and strategies. I picked up this pistol with ice damage and started using it without much hope of it being useful, but boy was I surprised. I was freezing enemies solid all over the place and then shattering them with a melee hit. Then I picked up a better grenade mod that also has ice damage. I would throw one, it would break into six "child" grenades, and explode in showers of snowy white. It was a little touch of winter, I thought. Winter on the moon.
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