Atari Mania mini-review

Wario, Where?

The average life expectancy of a brand is about twenty years. Despite a succession of severe struggles, Atari remains intact a full half-century from its inception. To help commemorate this milestone, Montreal-based developer Illogika has crafted a collection of mini-games built around many of Atari’s celebrated properties.Regretfully,this isn’t the birthday gift that the pioneer of computers, arcade and console games truly deserves.

Delve into the recent PC and Switch release and Atari Mania reveals promise, with a barrage of references that might delight old-timers. You play as the caretaker for the museum-like Atari Vault. This is where faded stars like Millipede’s eponymous villain and Pete from the 2600 port of Outlaw enjoy their retirement. Pleasingly, Illogika endows these characters with the personality that the hardware of the era couldn’t provide. Millie the Millipede laments about being typecast as a malicious insect, while old Pete is the same kind of western relic as Toy Story’s Woody. But arguably, the best characterization comes from a heel turn by a character who has been seen since 1995’s Atari Karts for the Atari Jaguar.

The caretaker’s fight through the digital underworld begins when a dead pixel appears on the Vault’s floor and starts swallowing up the retirees. You give chase, making your way through processions of remixed Atari titles. Undoubtedly, it’s an interesting notion that creates mashups from classics like Pong, Millipede, and Dodge ‘Em. With over 150 different mini-games, Atari Mania should elicit nostalgic memories for anyone familiar with gaming’s inaugural era.

But instead, the game squanders its potential. First, many of the mini-games aren’t sufficiently explained. One early diversion has you moving a cursor around an inventory screen to select a specific object. But Atari Mania doesn’t tell you that moving the cursor over other items (you know, like most inventory interfaces) results in an instant failure. Sure, you’ll learn from your mistakes, but there’s a high number of challenges where you won’t quite understand the objective the first few times you face them. Yes, that happened in the WarioWare series, but not nearly as often as it occurs here.

But the game’s most disturbing issue is the responsiveness of the controls. Some events have intuitive goals, such as walking old Pete through a series of moving obstacles to reach the other side of the screen. But expect quite a few inadvertent fails just because his walking speed isn’t suitable for squeezing through small openings. Even the paddles in Pong remixes don’t control as tautly as they should. Plus, you’ll have to face more than a few game-breaking bugs. Occasionally, I’d lose a life due to a programming oversight rather than any lack of skill.

To ensure my reflexes weren’t fading, I revisited WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames, making it all the way through Mona’s story. I committed two flubs and they were totally my fault. It’s rather telling that I wanted to continue playing that title rather than suffer through Atari Mania.

The lackluster gameplay is disappointing because, beneath all the jank, there’s an effort to commemorate Atari’s rich legacy. Beyond breathing life into notable characters, the Vault offers collectible box art and manuals. Sure, the lightweight puzzles aren’t anything that you haven’t encountered before, tasking players with using different tools on environmental objects. But in a way, they work better than navigating the plane from Combat through a field of asteroids. If you’re really yearning for an Atari revival, the Adamvision’s Recharged reboots is the way to go.

Atari Mania was played on Switch with review code provided by the publisher.