Criteria
Comments
Rating
- Game library Mattel hid the identity of the developers for a reason: they made damn good games.
- Graphics Much better than the (admittedly more popular) Atari. The colors were sharp and the sprites generally looked like what they were supposed to.
- Controller(s) The controls always took a bit of figuring out, and the controllers were always the first thing to break (and break repeatedly).
- Design and form factor It's nice if you own a station wagon.
- Other features (media, online, etc.) Intellivoice is where it's at.
- Noise Fans? Where we're going, we don't need fans.
Detailed review
My parents bought this shortly after they got married, and it was a regular feature of my childhood, pulled out on weekends and played with for hours on end.
We had a pretty decent selection of games; particular favorites of mine were Triple Action (was never really that good at keeping the plane in the air, though), Frog Bog, Lock 'n' Chase, and Beauty and the Beast. My parents also had some of the Tron games, but I could never quite figure them out (and they weren't nearly as cool as the movie, obviously).
One persistent problem we had was with the controllers. Each controller had a numeric keypad with a silver direction disc at the bottom. There were apparently also buttons on the side, but I don't remember using these at all. The direction disc worked just fine, but the buttons could be a real pain in the butt. They weren't very fun to push, and without the overlays it was hard to know which button did what since there wasn't a standard control scheme across every game. The controllers were also prone to breaking, which wouldn't be such a problem if not for the fact that they are hard-wired to the system. My father ended up cannibalizing an extra console that he got for cheap. Good news is, it's pretty simple to do, once you have the parts.
Overall I thought it was a very cool and classy system, and I never felt lacking in owning one instead of an Atari (or Colecovision).
We had a pretty decent selection of games; particular favorites of mine were Triple Action (was never really that good at keeping the plane in the air, though), Frog Bog, Lock 'n' Chase, and Beauty and the Beast. My parents also had some of the Tron games, but I could never quite figure them out (and they weren't nearly as cool as the movie, obviously).
One persistent problem we had was with the controllers. Each controller had a numeric keypad with a silver direction disc at the bottom. There were apparently also buttons on the side, but I don't remember using these at all. The direction disc worked just fine, but the buttons could be a real pain in the butt. They weren't very fun to push, and without the overlays it was hard to know which button did what since there wasn't a standard control scheme across every game. The controllers were also prone to breaking, which wouldn't be such a problem if not for the fact that they are hard-wired to the system. My father ended up cannibalizing an extra console that he got for cheap. Good news is, it's pretty simple to do, once you have the parts.
Overall I thought it was a very cool and classy system, and I never felt lacking in owning one instead of an Atari (or Colecovision).
good review!
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