Just because a game was good yesterday doesn't necessarily mean it can endure the test of time and still delight alongside the more modern crop of titles. Dusting down ancient consoles and games can therefore be rather anticlimactic, even if they were good "back in the day" gaming has indeed moved on, as have we.
The original Atari has a very rich history, unarguably achieving many great things for the industry and leaving a significant mark on the gaming map. The Atari games vault has been well and truly raided to put together this huge collection of 85 titles, which have been derived from the arcades and the much loved Atari 2600.
It has to be said that the majority of the games on the disc are rather rubbish. The back of the box claims that all these 85 games started a revolution, although this is clearly a lie as they have included some of the most obscure stuff imaginable. For every classic like Asteroids there's throwaway nonsense like Human Cannonball to contend with.
It's not all nasty stuff though as classics such as Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede and Dodge 'Em have also been included. As enjoyable and addictive as some of these titles are, they do admittedly become relatively repetitive after extended play. The past simplicity of such titles does begin to show through, in spite of this there's still nothing as satisfying as achieving a high score.
Atari Anthology is a decent collection, but you have got to be really into retro gaming to get anything out of it. The disc has quite a large number of games that we will continually return to, but even more that we just couldn't care less about. To sum it up, it's a rather mixed collection of memories and junk for a bargain price then.
6/10
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