We're awash in videogame nostalgia, with movie and game executives digging through the corpses of history like hungry archaeologists who've just discovered that mummies taste like beef jerky. With a Thundercats movie coming, Bionic Commando recently ruined by a third dimension, and the return of a little boy in a toga treated as if that was a good thing, people forget that absolutely everything is better now. Anyone who says early videogames beat modern titles is wearing rose-tinted glasses so powerful Cyclops could use them.
Hey guys, my nostalgia beam can see some POGS!
That's why I'm putting nostalgia to the ultimate test: playing Atari 2600 games for an entire day, and seeing what happens.
The PS3 has blue LEDs because they look super-modern. The Atari had wood because FIRE WAS THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY BACK THEN.
I went to my local Store Of Retrotasticness...
...equipped myself from their Armory Of Ancient Weapons...
The SuperScope gives a +5 to Painful Neck!
... and helped myself to a whole bucket of pain.
Between this and some electronic internet help I was armed with over 500 ancient games. And if you think you've relived your childhood because of some Flash-site abomonition of an Atari emulation, you haven't, because you don't have one of these.
Claiming to play 2600 games without the joystick is like time-travelling to the Dark Ages and not catching smallpox. The old stick is an essential element of the experience. Specifically, the element that makes every game feel like you're in the fortieth year of an unhappy marriage, with every instruction a minor, easy, but extremely annoying argument every time you want to do something. It's so unresponsive even the average players starts imagining cybernetic-psychic powers, tilting the joystick and hoping the hardware has developed tilt sensors through your sheer psychotic hatred.
I hooked it all up through my megaputer. I don't have to worry about looking like a nerd, because I've already admitted to owning an Atari joystick, so I can tell you my PC makes the intelligence-expanding Monolith in 2001 look like a retard. Controlling it with a joystick feels like fitting a rudder to a warp drive.
Controlling this with an Atari is dumber than steering the USS Enterprise with a joystick.
No, sorry, that was still dumber. WAY dumber.
I'm going to play Atari 2600 games non-stop for an entire day. I'm not allowed to stop. I'm not allowed to "take a break," or Alt+Tab, or otherwise walk around in a world where there are "curves" and "noises which don't sound like tortured cyber-farts." By the end, I'll be lucky if I can see in more than four colors.
Please continue to Part 2: Game Day!
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