OK, so several weeks back while on a getaway out of town, I was bored and saw these flashback consoles you guys were talking about in WalMart, so I picked up the Colecovision one to try it out. They also had the Atari FB5, but I still have my original console, as well as the Atari FB 4, so didn't really need that one...and the Intellivision one...well, looking at the games on there, that one just looked like it sucked. I didn't see much of anything other than sports related themed games that didn't look like it was going to entertain me,
So believe it or not, this you might find interesting....I never played the Colecovision console when growing up. I'm definitely an Atari child, I guess we never cared about getting anything else. I recall my friend having the Colecovision, but I never was attracted to it for whatever reason, perhaps it was the fuckomatic control doohickey with the calculator pad on it...math always scared me, so that probably explains why I stayed away from it. Seriously though, I STILL can't figure out why they needed all those calculator laid out buttons.
Anyway, so now you get a totally "fresh" viewpoint from a first time "newbie" to give a kinda unbiased opinion on it i guess. With all the games it offered, I figured there has to be some cool "new" games to me I could find, and if nothing else, it said on the box "plays exactly like the real arcade games" (or something to that nature) about Frenzy, Omega Race, and several others....so at least THAT would probably be worth it. So....well, NO... I played those, and they totally sucked. Nothing at all close to the real arcade quality or graphics. However, I guess in 1980's terms, it was probably OK, and considering most Atari games were dots and square dots as your men, this was probably OK in retrospect. The first impressions though....not so great. I tried out almost all of the games over several nights, Pepper II is OK, but hard as hell to control with the "clusterfuck" joystick thing, i think another I like is Amazon Hunt...Blackjack is fine for basic entertainment.... but WTF, no Donkey Kong??? I thought that was definitely on these original consoles back in the day, why the hell wouldn't they include their most popular game(s) here, plus the other 2 sequels?
Anyway, the consoles at Walmart were $40, so not really worth it for that price imo. For $20, yeah I'd go ahead and grab one, i'll search for Ebay, and might even get the Atari FB5 also if it's cheap enough since it has 92 self contained games...it's just nice to have a whole collection built in. Bottom line, these are fine and true to form, they provide the "flashback" nostalgia experience. However, as spoiled as we are today, they don't come anywhere close to even a bad version of Mame that most or all of us have, and sure as hell don't compare to the real arcade games if you happen to have them. For an afternoon of nostalgia, if you can get one cheap, it's probably fine, but don't see most of us or even (especially) kids these days playing it on a regular basis (they have ZERO nostalgia for it, so probably no interest in this stuff at ALL), especially compared to all the newfangled games and high def stuff out there now.