Friday, March 30, 2012

Atari Anthology: A review

Hallo, welcome to the new and improved Crud Wizard. It's been a few months since I posted anything with school and such so to make up for it I am going to review a retro video game in vivid detail.
Well, let's start things off by saying this game is hugely addicting. The simple ideas that now might seem completely clichéd aren't here because they were the original. A lot of modern video games try much too hard with spectacular graphics, complicated missions and great voice acting. Most of the time these games are good but some just stretch it and loose the idea of fun, while they're caught up in making a flawless product. Other video games just aren't that good. Atari Anthology brings back the simple ideas of Centipede or Pong. These games do lose some of the experience though when they are converted to the Playstation or Xbox controllers, instead of the classic Atari 2600 joystick or Arcade stick. Besides that this game is a fun, maybe even more than some modern games. Some people might say that games from the seventies are not fun and that is why we moved on. I don't think so. While these games aren't technically advanced they are quite amusing; isn't that what video games are supposed to be: amusing?
The graphics in this game are literally the same as those arcade games many people know from the 80s or many laundromats that have them. When it comes to graphics, the advanced, highly-rendered, textured, smooth graphics of new games are an obvious choice to their pixelated predecessors. Not much detail is needed to talk about the graphics in this game.
Soundtrack is sort of a useless topic when talking about this game for the only sound is the classic beeps and boops that were the original soundtrack for most games. This is another case where the modern version clearly outranks the earlier predecessor.
This is a classic don't-judge-a-book-by-its-cover case. This is truly the last stand of Atari and it's a pretty good one.



THE FINAL RESULTS
Fun--79/100
Graphics--10/100*
Ease of Play--85/100
Sound--10/100*
OVERALL (NOT AN AVERAGE)
80/100-- Great


*Since the game is an anthology of games from the 70s-80s its graphics and sound aren't expected to be nearly as good as its modern successors. 


GALLERY

What a yellow dungeon...

I never knew there were high scores in space???


The championship game of the PBA (Pixel Basketball Association)