izigame.me

Let me get one thing out of the way that I want to make perfectly clear. I'm really not a big fan of old school Atari games. I'm talking mainly on the ones developed or published by Atari for the 2600. Not knocking some of the quality 3rd party stuff found on Atari 2600. A lot of that was good. Especially from the likes of Activision. But Atari themselves released a lot of pretty basic stuff. That's not to say it was all bad. They had some fun titles scattered. But it was mostly pretty bland. This is one of the reasons I could not without any good conscience recommend the previous Atari Vault collection that was delisted and replaced with this title. And because of this I had my doubts on Atari 50 being any good.
I'm glad I was wrong. Atari 50 is fantastic.
They trimmed a lot of the fat from the 2600 line. Not to say they got rid of all the duds. Some of those are still here. As it stands they dropped the 2600 collection down to about 50 titles (after the free update added a few more titles), and expanded their arcade collection by a good amount adding in some really fun titles. They also added in games from the 5200 and 7800, as well as the Lynx and Jaguar, and some of the Atari home computers as well. In total over 100 classic titles. Much like before they are not all winners, but there is a lot more to be exicted about with this one, such as Tempest 2000, Cloak & Dagger, Ninja Golf, Miner 2049er and more. What's more is that for this collection Digital Eclipse actually did some remakes of a few of the titles such as Haunted House, Yar's Revenge and more. They even did a new Sword Quest title!
The real winner here though is not the games. Instead it is the overly impressive interactive documentary style wrapper that holds everything together. Digital Eclipse really nailed this. You can either just browse the game list at will, or what I'd really recommend doing is going through the documentary which is loaded with documentation, scans, blurbs, video interviews, old footage, and a lot more spanning nearly the entire history of Atari's console and computer legacy. At different points in the documentary you will also come across games that are in the collection ready to play.
It's a really novel way to do a retro compilation and it just works perfectly and adds value to this collection. I'd love to see other companies take note when handling their own compilations and maybe give us a similar type of presentation on the legacy of their own games.