Atari Vault Review 2016 | Steam
This is the Atari Steam Pack 100 and it’s is my very first steam game. I have played PC games in the past, but this is my first steam game. In general, I like to play my modern games on a console like the Xbox one so I don’t really play very many PC games. I thought it would be fun to download and install the Atari steam punk 100 and check it out what I didn’t know was how difficult it would be to get the controller working and some of the other obstacles that I would have to overcome to play the games properly to begin with.
I tried to use my Atari cx40 joysticks (I use the Atari Retro Link usb adapter, works great with Stella, Vice, and other emulation)and I had no luck getting them to play even the classic games like adventure or asteroids so I did some research after the fact and realize you have to have a steam compatible joystick or you can get your Xbox one controller to work if you purchase an adapter for windows for your Xbox
So I thought about it and decided to go ahead and purchase a wireless adapter for xbox ,with the assumption that this would not be my only steam game. I thought this adapter would be more less plug-and-play, but boy was I wrong it turns out not only did the steam software not recognize the wireless adapter neither did windows on windows 10 so I had to go out search the web to a driver for my PC. I would’ve shared the driver here but I am assuming it will probably be different depending on your PC configuration.
Once I got the controller working I was able to start testing out in more detail the Atari steam pack 100 collection. Unfortunately there are very few arcade games available with the collection but the ones that they did include like asteroids, missile command, centipede, and other’s do seem to work very well and are fun to play.
Switching over to the classic Atari games, I started noticing anomalies when I played asteroids The screen would flicker, the sound wasn’t quite right, the screen would flash on and off it was kind of weird so then I switched to missile command, figuring it should be fine. The flickering continued there and the audio was way off in that really bothered me I can’t enjoy missile command with the audio that messed up. It was really ruining the experience for me so then being new to steam I want to head and looked on the community forums and I saw that of course that other people are having the same problem problems and that there was a beta version available. There were a lot of like a lot of steps required to opt in but I went ahead and tried it out tried out the software again and with the beta.
They added a scanline feature and they seemed to have fixed the flickering and the audio issues seem to of been resolved however you’ll notice in my video that if you don’t have the correct screen size selected the software seems to crash but this is a beta . I like the menus the way its brought together in the background music in the menus I like that there is a gallery for each game I like that there’s a manual for each game but I think that the way it’s displayed could be better but you cannot zoom into the manual if it’s blurry and once you release the mouse it scrolls all the way back to the left side.
I like that there’s a leaderboard feature which is cool so you can compare your scores against the rest of the community I think that’s a great feature. However to get to the top of the leaderboard you have to push the little button up in the top right and you can’t really scroll up there really quickly and it takes forever so it’s too slow to display the leaderboard so that the downside you can’t sort it from high score lower price versa.
One of the reasons why bought the software was I wanted to try the multiplayer experience out. but being a new steam user I have no friends on steam and since this isn’t apparently a very popular game there’s nobody on multiplayer and I was unable to find a multiplayer match or even create one I created some but nobody ever would join me to play so I was unable to test the multiplayer aspect
Overall, right now, I really can’t recommend this software because it’s a little on the pricey side at $20 and you can download nearly all of these games on the Internet and play properly in emulation, with a more genuine experience.
Also, I thought 100 games would be plenty, once you realize that the Pack is missing many, many classics such as defender, berzerk, Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Mountain King, etc.., You sort of feel, I don’t want to say, cheated, but you just want more… You can never have enough Atari…
On a side note, there is a very similar app on my Android phone “Atari Greatest Hits”. You can purchase all 100 games for $9.99. I believe this to be the mobile counter-part to this steam pack. Just my personal preference, but I believe it’s worth 10 bucks to play your top atari games on mobile.
Youtube Description:
This is my review of the recently released Atari Vault (March 24th, 2016) 100 Atari games on Steam. The video really is only 5 minutes long with remainder of video containing gameplay.
Download Link on Steam website:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/400020/
Amazon link for Retro Link to PC USB Cable:
http://www.amazon.com/Retro-Link-Atari-PC-USB-Cable/dp/B007ZS35CU
Amazon link for Microsoft Xbox Controller Adapter:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Xbox-Wireless-Adapter-Windows-one/dp/B00ZB7W4QU/ref=sr_1_1?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1460238120&sr=1-1&keywords=xbox+one+wireless
Youtube Original Post Date: 04/09/2016
