Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Review (KDD!^putler kaputt 26/93)
If you try to report a bug mad community managers will erase you and call you a liar and will make insane claims which are disproven by their own advertising. They they will block you and re-edit all their own inflammatory posts, entirely changing the replies. But steam always marks edited posts. Digital Eclipse is a scam.
Centisecond 50: The Input Lag Celebration.
This release from Digital Eclipse is a new form of media. It was conceived as a merge between a reference book on the publisher, and an actual anthology of games. But since not everything present in the encyclopedia is playable, the concept doesn't actually work. It's not an all-encompassing absolute definitive final word on the topic.
But this can and should be treated as a separate collection of games. There's a button in the menu to jump directly to the one-dimensional list of games. And there are a lot of games, so this GUI sucks. You have to go through each of the games one by one. At the fastest you can skip one letter at a time by pressing Shift+=. So there's still 26 letter in the latin alphabet plus some numbers.
This software offers easy to use emulation, which is especially important for the arcade games.
The rendering options are very limited. And as an attempt at an interactive reference book, this is not a series of emulated or re-enacted games, but a separate app baked into a 16:9 render. So if you have a vertical 4:3 screen, CRT or not, you can't play these properly, without severe windowboxing. The arcade games have dip switches options. There are no rebinds, even when the default controls make barely any sense. In most of the games the input lag is insane. At a light tap it can even refuse to register. You can press a button then release it, and the game will react after you've already released the button. In the 18 years i barely ever talked about input lag, and this is the most insane i've ever seen. There are save states even in the score-attack games, but not in the modern games in this collection. Sometimes it crashes.
Breakout 3/10
Breakout VCS 3/10
Super Breakout 3/10
Super Breakout VCS 3/10
Super Breakout 5200 SuperSystem 3/10
Neo Breakout 2/10
Pong 0/10 IT DOES NOT WORK
Vctr-Sctr 2/10