{"id":1173,"date":"2016-07-06T08:25:09","date_gmt":"2016-07-06T12:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/?p=1173"},"modified":"2019-06-27T10:19:03","modified_gmt":"2019-06-27T14:19:03","slug":"atari-on-the-beach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/?p=1173","title":{"rendered":"Atari on the Beach"},"content":{"rendered":"

In late spring, we took the kids on a week long beach trip.\u00a0 When I checked the weather, it seemed likely to rain for half of it, so I thought it would be good to have a few indoor activities on deck.\u00a0 I considered packing a tablet, but that would end up being solitary and anti-social, so I thought, \u201cWhy not Atari?\u201d<\/p>\n

I packed a Video Computer System, two joysticks, the required cables and some carts (a baker\u2019s dozen) and away we went.<\/p>\n

It turned out we did get a fair share of rain and with a bit of luck, the circa 1977 console hooked up fine to the modern flat screen TV in the condo, even if the bullets in Space Invaders were very blurry.<\/p>\n

Both of my sons \u2013 aged five and eight \u2013 humor me from time to time by playing Atari with me.\u00a0 My oldest saw the movie Pixels \u2013 a very dumb film that nevertheless captured a bit of truth about 80s arcades \u2013 and he will ask to play Q*bert or Centipede on occasion.\u00a0 My youngest likes Atari, particularly if we play two-player games where I can take it easy on him or we can just be silly.\u00a0 I figured with a captive audience at the beach, we might have some fun.<\/p>\n

\"atarionthebeach-carts\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I brought a mix of two-player games (Air Sea Battle, Boxing, Combat, & Freeway), decent arcade ports (Berzerk, Centipede, Dig Dug, & Space Invaders) and some of my favorite Activision titles (Crackpots, Enduro, Megamania, River Raid, & Seaquest).\u00a0 In hindsight, I probably could have skipped the Activision games that weren\u2019t two-player.<\/p>\n

Boxing, Combat and Freeway were a hit.\u00a0 Boxing, being basically a fancy version of Rock\u2018em Sock\u2018em Robots, is kind of the platonic ideal for a fun Atari game for all skill levels.\u00a0 In Combat, we mostly stuck with the Tank Pong variants, the best parts of the game.\u00a0 Freeway gets a bad rap for being a poor man\u2019s Frogger, but it\u2019s a fun two-player game in its own right with great sound, and since it restricts movement to up and down, Freeway is well-suited to younger players.\u00a0 Air Sea Battle was more of a bust, and I\u2019m not sure why.<\/p>\n

\"atarionthebeach-spaceinvaders\"<\/a>In the arcade group, we tried Space Invaders first.\u00a0 They gave it a proper go, including simultaneous two-player, but it proved to be too frustrating, most likely due to the blurry bullets.\u00a0 Berzerk was also a bust, even the kids\u2019 variation, but we found Dig Dug fun on easy \u2013 particularly once we made our own game of “Clear all the Dirt”.\u00a0 Centipede was the clear winner in this lot, as both kids enjoyed playing the game.\u00a0 My older son really stuck with it and was getting good at clearing multiple boards by the end of vacation.<\/p>\n

My favorite Activision games were mostly duds, which makes sense in hindsight, as I tend to like their games that require constant movement and dodging from the player.\u00a0 That\u2019s a lot to ask of kids with small hands who are not used to Atari joysticks.\u00a0 The exception was Crackpots.\u00a0 The novelty of dropping flowerpots onto crawling bugs added a bit of theatricality compared to the usual spaceships, blocks and stick figures of typical Atari games.\u00a0 Add movement that is limited to the left and right and add gameplay that is more about timing and pattern recognition versus hand-eye coordination, and Crackpots proves to be just kid friendly enough to hold their interest.<\/p>\n

There was some frustration and fighting due to the different ages and skill levels, but overall, I\u2019d call it a successful sharing of dad\u2019s old junk on a few rainy days.<\/p>\n

–\u00a0Ben<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In late spring, we took the kids on a week long beach trip.\u00a0 When I checked the weather, it seemed likely to rain for half of it, so I thought it would be good to have a few indoor activities on deck.\u00a0 I considered packing a tablet, but that would end up being solitary and …<\/p>\n

Atari on the Beach<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atari"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/atarionthebeach.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2Gkjg-iV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1532,"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions\/1532"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}