Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Review - A Half-Century Of Gaming History Stuffed Into An Excellent Package

Reviewed on: Switch
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Digital Eclipse
Rating: Teen

On June 27, 1972, Atari, as we know it today, was born. Well, technically, it was born a few months earlier under the name Syzygy Engineering, but the name Atari started life in 1972. I know this and many more interesting facts about the company because of Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, Digital Eclipse's love letter to the gaming giant.

Atari 50 is essentially a playable documentary, walking you through 50 years of Atari's games, home consoles, handhelds, and PCs split into five different timelines. Each of the five timelines focuses on a different aspect of the business, with dates sometimes running concurrently. Each one is packed with videos, images, design documents, and more. It's a museum exhibit in a box and a delightful one to boot.

This magical history tour contains an astounding 103 playable games, from the original 1972 arcade version of Pong to a selection from the Jaguar and Lynx, Atari's final home console and handheld, respectively. Each is a 1:1 port as if Digital Eclipse ripped the motherboards from the machines themselves and transferred the game into my console. While there are plenty of old favorites like Asteroids, Breakout, and Adventure, I found some of the lesser-known titles, like Quantum and I, Robot, fascinating in their own right.

 

Not content to simply port over old titles, Digital Eclipse included a handful of other titles elevating this collection to the stratosphere. Two separate homebrew games appear in the story, one for the Atari 800 PC and the other for the Atari 2600, which showcase just how much can still be done with older consoles in the present day. Seeing a game company even acknowledge the homebrew scene is rare, but for Atari and Digital Eclipse to embrace the community enough to include it here is wonderful. 

However, it's Digital Eclipse's own creations that steal the 50th-anniversary show. The Reimagined series includes seven old-school Atari games rebuilt by the team for the modern age, and seeing these older games is wonderfully nostalgic. Haunted Houses is my favorite reimagining, as the defined 3D environment completely transforms the original experience. Yars' Revenge Enhanced is also very good, even though it doesn't stray as far from the original.

I must include one important caveat: these are Atari games in their original form, meaning they are as rudimentary as classic games get. Some games have the lifespan of a mayfly, while others – the multiplayer games in particular – have more to offer. Even the Reimagined set, while well-crafted, may only last 15 to 20 minutes per session. This is a collection of quick hits, and it doesn't take very long to get through the 100 games included in the library, meaning your mileage may vary from a replayability standpoint.

Outside of the game library, the love and care Digital Eclipse put into this project is unmistakable, as is evident by some of the relics it has included in each of the timelines. The hundreds of photos, old box art, and videos offer an incredible look back at what Atari was at the height of its powers. The old 1980s-era TV commercials are particularly notable; seeing a child express excitement for E.T. is hysterical in hindsight. 

Some of these inclusions go above and beyond. Take The Swordquest series, which had three released games and a fourth that never launched. Back in the day, each game was bundled with a small comic book that not only told the story of the game, but also gave clues on how to solve the puzzles within the corresponding game. Atari 50 includes each one of those comics in their entirety so you can get the full experience and benefit from those clues. 

As for that fourth unreleased Swordquest, Digital Eclipse found the design concepts from the series' creator Tod Frye, built it from scratch, and included it as one of the seven "Reimagined" games. To say that this collection is thorough is an understatement, and Digital Eclipse's respect for the source materials is noticed and appreciated.

My favorite part of the historical inclusions are the dozens of video interviews with not only members of the Atari team throughout the years but other prominent game developers across the industry. Notable Atari alumni featured include company founder Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn who is credited as the creator of Pong, and programmer Eugene Jarvis. Other featured names include Double Fine's Tim Schafer and Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski. Each interview adds new stories, anecdotes, and a bit of technical wisdom to the legend of Atari, while giving the whole collection that special documentary feel, with little moments of explanation peppered throughout a treasure trove of digital artifacts. 

With Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, Digital Eclipse has set a new bar for future historical compilations in video games. It's a digital traveling museum exhibit, as the game bursts at the seams with nostalgia thanks to more than 100 playable games and hundreds of relics from the developer's vault. While a good amount of the games offered will pass by quickly, those brief life spans cannot weigh down the amazing historical value of Atari 50, and I hope Digital Eclipse has more wings of its digital history tour opening in the coming years. 

Score: 9

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Marvel's Midnight Suns – Super-Powered Strategy

Reviewed on: PC
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis Games
Rating: Teen

Play enough games, and you start to develop an eye for the ones that are going to demand a lot of your time and focus. Within minutes, I knew Firaxis’ comic book-powered adventure with the Marvel superheroes would be one of those games, filled as it is with numerous currencies, cosmetics, and gameplay systems. Midnight Suns is a strategy/RPG of tremendous depth, character development in both storytelling and upgrades, and many dozens of hours of gameplay to uncover. While the repetitive nature of the storytelling structure is sometimes a chore, the combat is top-notch. It injects the slow-paced XCOM tactical experience Firaxis is known for with a gamma-powered boost, leading to rewarding battles that stay fresh even after you’ve sunk countless hours into the experience.

An ancient evil has awoken, threatening to plunge the world into the darkness of an Elder God’s malice. Familiar heroes like Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Ghost Rider, and Captain Marvel have no choice but to resurrect the long-dead Hunter who once defeated the threat hundreds of years earlier. You control this revived hero as they lead Earth’s mightiest against this danger.

Combat follows the turn-based tactical loop of Firaxis’ XCOM games but abandons giant battlefields and cover points for tighter arenas and a card-based action selection inspired by deck-building gameplay. Each character has an array of card attacks, skills, and heroic abilities that leverage their unique talents, and it’s tremendously fun to stack each character deck to greater heights of dominance.

While there’s plenty of time to consider each move carefully, the action feels more bombastic and faster moving than most tactical games. Every card has a special animation accentuating the character’s uniqueness, and the battles look beautiful as they play out. Wolverine surges back from a KO with renewed power. Magik’s portals send enemies hurtling across the field. Captain America flings his shield to bounce between hapless Hydra forces, taunting them to take him on. And everyone leaps over barriers, hurling boulders and blasting explosive barrels to add to the chaos – just like any good cinematic superhero fight.

The complexity of this system grows over time, gradually layering in objectives you might need to confront or unique enemy mechanics you must overcome. You might be asked to damage a helicopter before it takes off or confront a demon who summons forth obelisks every turn that must be smashed if you don’t want to be overwhelmed. Get deep enough into the game, and you even start to see some fascinating puzzle challenges crop up, where you must complete a particular task using only certain cards or other constraints. Firaxis built a robust and exciting combat engine and leveraged many ways to keep it engaging and new.

In between battles, you return to the Abbey, a sprawling social and exploration space. Here, you can upgrade and train your heroes, build new combat items, and unlock an impressive array of cosmetic tweaks for characters and home décor. The grounds of the Abbey also house a mystically infused adventure game of secret clues, arcane treasure chests, and story snippets about the past; it leads to some intriguing discoveries but can sometimes distract from the flow of the main story.

The Abbey also acts as a giant friendship simulation, where you gradually play out interpersonal dramas with the likes of Spider-Man and Blade. The dialogue selections (and the option to choose light or dark conversation responses) is most reminiscent of BioWare games like Dragon Age or Knights of the Old Republic and can sometimes come across as overly simplistic. A metric ton of these interactions unfold over the course of the game; each builds your status with these individuals, which in turn reflects in their abilities during combat. I mostly enjoyed the focus on character development. But with a game this big, I eventually tired of the rote loop of conversations after every mission, some of which devolve into dull dialogue exchanges that would be more at home in a reality TV show than a superhero adventure.

For all its focus on supernatural magic and demonic threats, Midnight Suns is a fun-loving and thrilling ride. XCOM strategy fans won’t be disappointed; the format changes still result in a gratifying combat flow. But this is a more approachable and story-driven experience than Firaxis has previously attempted, filled with some of the most recognizable pop culture heroes of the moment. It’s big, boisterous, and a little bit silly at times, but just like the best of Marvel’s output in recent years, it’s also a rousing good time.

 

Score: 8.5

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The Callisto Protocol Review – Morsels Of Fun In A Far-Too-Familiar Space

Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
Publisher: Krafton
Developer: Striking Distance Studios
Rating: Mature

Nearly a decade and a half ago, Visceral Games released Dead Space, a now cult-classic survival-horror game inspired by the likes of Alien and The Thing. If you've ever yearned for a return to its mix of sci-fi and horror, or if you want a near-identical experience to Schofield’s first survival horror hit, you’re in luck. Schofield's latest, The Callisto Protocol, veers incredibly close to Dead Space, for both better and worse. Unfortunately, though, it’s far too familiar. There are glimmers of greatness, namely in its opening hours, but what unfolds after is a tiresome and unsurprising eight hours that feel like a relic of the past.

The Callisto Protocol is set primarily in Black Iron Prison and the surrounding area on one of Jupiter’s moons, Callisto. After a crash landing, correctional officers imprison protagonist Jacob Lee and Dani Nakamura in Black Iron Prison. Something goes wrong; Jacob escapes his cell, and shortly after, meets his first biophage, a highly-mutated monstrosity who’s more fleshy pustulating gore than human. 

The game introduces its unique melee combat system here, and it’s one of the highlights. Dodging by pulling left and right on the control stick is engaging, as are the heavy and slow swings of Jacob’s melee attack. Each hit carries a ton of impact, and with proper timing and precise dodges, I took down enemies using just this electrified prison baton in a satisfying way. Guns are later folded into the mix, but they’re not as satisfying as the baton, nor do they meaningfully differentiate themselves from one another. Upgrading my baton to keep it useful until the end felt like a necessity, although ammo is plentiful if you wish to go into encounters with guns blazing. The telekinesis-like pull-and-throw GRP system is useful and fun, but there’s disappointingly little to do with it beyond throwing enemies into the same three types of insta-death machinery, off a ledge, or away from you. 

You are asked by characters talking through the radio to go here and there, and right when you show up, something goes wrong, and now you need to meet them at this location instead. After a few hours, I was predicting most of the story beats in advance, all the while being fed bread crumbs of a larger narrative. Sure, things happened, but I rarely saw a semblance of the game’s overarching story until the final hour, at which point it felt like a rushed dump of information. While Dani’s story, which weaves in and out of Jacob’s throughout the duration of the game, comes to a satisfying conclusion, Jacob’s does not, ending with a scene that feels inorganically enticing and designed to ensure I purchase the upcoming story DLC. 

The final boss before this disappointing climax is an exhausting and repetitive fight that feels like those of yesteryear; the one every game had to include, even if it didn’t prove necessary. This wasn’t the only disappointing boss. All of them left me feeling empty and annoyed at the lack of variance. You fight the same enemy type as a boss multiple times throughout the game, just in different arenas. Most bosses can kill you in one hit, which takes away the earned stress of survival horror. I wasn’t desperate to find ammo or a health pack to survive by the skin of my teeth; I was just jogging away to ensure its hits didn’t land close to me.

Furthering my frustration is a bad checkpoint system. You must redo the entire battle if you die by insta-kill, even at the tail end of a boss fight. If you have to kill a few enemies before that battle, you need to do that again, too. The same goes for ammo, audio logs, and other resources, as well, even if you save right where you’d like to pick up post-death after doing this kind of preparation. Bad checkpointing is also present in standard enemy encounters, which quickly became stale.

 

Listening to audio logs, which add small touches of needed flavor to the area you’re playing through, requires you to stay in the log menu, and you can’t move or search the environment while listening. The death animations are exciting and gruesome, but they lack variety. They’re buggy, too, and some death scenes are drastically more interesting to watch play out than others. A biophage pulling Jacob’s eyes out of the sockets, for example, is great. But watching an enemy knock Jacob to the ground in an unintentionally hilarious and anticlimactic ragdoll-like fashion falls flat. 

Gun animations, which play when switching weapons, look nice at first, but you must agonizingly sit through each to use a new weapon. If you aim too early or hit reload during the animation, the sequence ends, and the weapon you were using prior to attempting this change returns. This is frustrating during tense combat encounters where I’m flipping through my handful of weapons to find the right one. A unique quick-fire mechanic that auto-locks onto an enemy’s weak point at the end of a melee combo is a nice addition to the combat’s systems, but if your equipped weapon is out of ammo or requires reloading and you don’t realize it, you hit fire only for nothing to happen, leaving you open for damage. The Callisto Protocol dies by a thousand cuts such as these. 

These various problems aside, though, The Callisto Protocol is still doing a lot of what Dead Space did, for better and worse. And to that end, there are moments of fun, even if, in contrast, they’re light on genuine terror. I’m okay with The Callisto Protocol being another version of its spiritual predecessor, but it struggles to nail even the basics. As a result, I’m underwhelmed, annoyed, and disappointed. If you wanted anything more out of this second crack at making a new sci-fi IP in survival horror, or something markedly different that acknowledges just how far gaming has come since 2008, The Callisto Protocol is not your answer.

Score: 6

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