Cheap Atari Flashback 2.0 (Video Games) (Electronic Game) Price

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Customer Reviews of Atari Flashback 2.0

... And in The Beginning, there was Atari...
What a blast from the past. I bought the Atari Flashback 2.0 as a sort-of-joke present for my sister's birthday a few months ago. My girlfriend returned the favor for my birthday just last week, and we took it with us on vacation, to a peaceful lakeside cabin where there's little more than a few books and a television that gets no reception to pass the time. My daughter and I spent a few hours over the course of three days playing pretty much every one of the 40 games included. <
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>First of all, at less than thirty bucks, the price is attractive for a trip down memory lane, and the Flashback really is a blast from Atari past. The console is simple to set up, right out of the box. it took about two minutes to get everything plugged in and to start playing. <
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>Those are the pluses. Unfortunately, that's about it. My memory of most of these games is vague, but even the best of them seemed a lot more fun when I was twelve years old, spending long afternoons at the supermarket or arcade, feeding hundreds of dollars in quarters into the Asteroids machine, and playing until I was the undisputed master of the neighborhood. <
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>Even my favorites have mostly been changed here, subtly tweaked so that they're not quite the games I remembered. The graphics are, of course, primitive, which is fine - even my eleven year old daughter, raised on Playstation and XBOX, had some fun, notably with Millipede. But here's a question: If you've already got Millipede, why include Centipede - which is basically the same game, but not as much fun? If I remember right, Atari released hundreds of games, and many of the better ones could've been included here instead of junk like Video Checkers and 3D Tic-Tac-Toe. A good bunch of the games in the package are buggy (Space Duel in particular - ships would disappear for no reason, leaving a lone player to shoot at himself, racking up points for the other player until the game ends...?), and others refused to play at all. Even my daughter (who is as good and intuitive a gamer as they come) had a difficult time figuring out how and when to use the select and difficulty buttons, or even if and when they apply to a particular game. The 'instruction manual' was absolutely no help. The revamped joysticks are stiff, making for jerky movements while playing, causing all sorts of problems (however, they may loosen up over time). Having to hit the Power button every time you want to switch to a new game is almost as annoying as having to take the time to swap cartridges, and the way the game files are needlessly laid out in sub-headed sections is irritating at best. <
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>Thirty bucks seems cheap for any game system these days, especially when you consider the forty 'classic' games programmed into this unit. But while we had some fun over the weekend, we flipped through most of the games quickly and only spent any real time playing a small handful of them. For us, I think the real test of this unit will come about six months down the road, if it's still hooked up to the TV at home, or stuffed in the box at a garage sale, right next to an original Atari and shoebox full of dusty old cartridges. We'll see...

A flawed little gem
It's a shame that once again what should have been a great little system was rushed out onto market with little or no QA testing. Out of the 40 games included, over a dozen will be unfamiliar to most people since they're either new titles created just for the FB2 or old ones that were never released (and the reason they weren't is because they're not fun to play). Rather strange considering this system is called the "Flashback". Most of the new games are hacked versions of older ones, with some being completely unplayable due to poor programmer. Actually some of the built-in games don't even run correctly! The lineup of titles included is pretty weak overall, considering there were 100s of games that were released for the original Atari 2600. I suppose an argument can be made as to why games like 3D Tic-Tac-Toe and Video Checkers are included, but I personally don't remember playing them very much (and Video Chess runs so slowly, nobody would waste time trying to play it these days). Centipede and Millipede are great games, but why do we need both here? And why clunkers like Human Cannonball were included instead of more well-known games like Space Invaders makes no sense. <
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>The manual is VERY light on information - descriptions for each game are reduced to a single paragraph, and there's no mention of what the difficulty switches do for each one. I guess it doesn't matter since there's no way to tell which way you have them set. <
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>The menu is more complicated than it needs to be, as there are 5 different categories (for only 40 games), and space games like Asteroids and Space Duel are in the "arcade" section, instead of the "space station" section (and vice-versa). One simple list of all 40 titles would have been much better. <
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>As far as modifying the system to use actual cartridges, don't bother. Due to internal hardware problems, there are incompatibility problems with dozens of games, including some of the most popular titles such as Boxing, Berzerk, Cosmic Ark, Decathlon, Dig Dug, Galaxian, Hero, Mario Bros, Pitfall 2, etc.... <
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>About the only real positive thing I can say about the system is the redesigned joysticks, but since there's so many problems with the system, you'd be better off using the joysticks on a real 2600 system. Whatever the reason(s)/excuses for the problems, dumping flawed product on consumers is a lousy thing to do, and this company has done it more than once, most notably with the original Flashback (1) model. For the price that these are selling for, you can pick up a Jakks Activision 10-in-1, Atari's 10-in-1, and Atari's 13-in-1 paddle TV systems. <
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