Posted by Ball Boy and Opa Opa on January 05, 2024 at 18:07:59 EST in reply to When I was a kid I knew a lot of people with 2600s and by 1985 or so I had a Coleco with the expansion module for 2600 games and a large collection of them thanks to the crash. I bought Star Control at K Mart for $2 with the pad. Most games were $1 by then and soon the NES would come out making them worth maybe $0.10.
Really good 2600 games are really good. This is a short list though…Warlords has been mentioned and honestly anything that uses the paddles is usually better than most joystick games. This is partly because of the devices themselves (really good paddles, really horrible sticks) but also due to the way analog controls work with games of this era and most paddle games being 2 if not 4 player. Combat is fucking great, Breakout, Kaboom, whatever. Joystick games not only have you getting an arm workout on that bastard stick but also suffering through horrible joystick code. It would be interesting to see the math on exactly how many watts a human generates to clear the first stage of Donkey Kong, the arcade version’s little ball stick versus the 2600 stick that feels like you’re rowing a 50’ yacht when you change direction. We also had a C64 around that time so the 2600 really seemed like the shittiest thing.
Most 2600 games aren’t very good at all. I’d say all but about 7 are utter crap. The arcade ports in particular are just…garbage. Garbage. My true place was the arcade and it was painful seeing and paying for those horrible ports. Before the crash 2600 games were $45, man! When gas was $0.45 a gallon! Expensive, bad ports are why I played more Coleco than NES or 2600. The Coleco is more often found doing things that it’s actually good at instead of fucked up unplayable garbage like Pac Man or Donkey Kong on 2600 or Ikari on NES. Man…I still remember driving 40 minutes each way to help a friend pay $50 for the NES version of Renegade only to learn that it was one of the worst conversions ever and TRU had stopped taking returns on games.
I don’t have any nostalgia for it or anything Atari other than their arcade machines which were often excellent. I pretty much just played Coleco and sometimes other people’s NESs until the 16-bit era got underway. Honestly 16-bit was the thing I was waiting for and I still play more of it than any other era.
If you were the kid who wanted Pac Man 2600 because of the Saturday morning cartoon then the 2600 wasn’t so bad but if you wanted Pac Man because you liked Pac Man you would be unhappy. If you paid for it with your own money you’d just turn into an asshole like me. (n/t) from SignOfZeta.
The 2600 sticks are definitely bad, but Coleco sticks were way worse. At least with the 2600 you could just use the better sticks by Epyx or Happ or even a Genesis pad. ColecoVision games weren't properly playable until the Nintendo DS emulator.
n/t
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