#oneaday Day 33: Catching Up

You know, on more than one occasion yesterday I thought "I really should remember to do my blog", and then I went and just… didn't do it. I don't really have a better excuse than that.

Well, I sort of do, I guess; yesterday was quite a busy day, what with an appointment in the morning, videos to record, edit and upload, articles to write and games to play. It's still not a good excuse, but it is a sort of excuse. So, well, apologies for that; you will get two posts today as suitable recompense, since you can't fudge the dates on Patreon to make it look like I actually posted this yesterday all along and you just didn't see it.

So what is there to update? Hmm. Well, the main thing is that I've already launched my new Atari A to Z series, delving into the 150 games that make up the Atari Flashback Classics collection on Switch. I'm just going through the games in the order they are presented on the game's menu, so that means all the arcade titles will be first, followed by the 2600 and 5200 games that comprise the bulk of the library.

There's a lot of reviews of Atari Flashback Classics that have mumbled and groaned about these games "not holding up" today… but one thing occurred to me yesterday while I was playing Sprint 2 on the toilet: these games are absolutely perfect for handheld play, making the Nintendo Switch an ideal platform for this collection.

I'm serious. Your average timed 2600 game lasts for a standard duration of two minutes and sixteen seconds — if you were wondering why such an odd number, it's because this amount of time is 2^13 frames at 60Hz, which the original American 2600 systems would have been operating at. This duration was calculated by Atari's boffins to be that "sweet spot" for arcade games where punters wouldn't get frustrated at their game being over too quickly, and equally people waiting in line wouldn't get fed up of waiting their turn. In the words of Joe Decuir, who played a key role in the development of the 2600, the Atari 8-bit computers and Commodore's Amiga, "2:16 is long enough to have fun without being exhausting. Sometimes there would be others waiting their turn to play. Plus, the Arcade operator would want more quarters… In the case of a home machine, it doesn't overtax a parent's patience. 'Mom, wait until I finish this game.'" Now you know.

But I digress. The short average duration of a 2600 game or early Atari arcade game makes it perfect for handheld play, because although the Switch does play host to plenty of long-duration, "big" games, sometimes you just want to pick up the system to play for a few minutes. Sometimes you don't want to play a shitty tablet game that bombards you with requests for microtransactions every level, or ads, or crap like that. Sometimes you just want two minutes and 16 seconds of pure game. And that's what you get.

On top of that, the delightfully big, chunky graphics of 2600 games mean that there's no squinting at the screen in handheld mode to understand what's going on. Everything (well, almost everything) is immediately understandable and clear, so long as you know how to play the game, so you can just get on with enjoying it.

Of course, some people will continue to be flat-out resistant to these games, believing them to be "too old" or whatever, but eh. I'm more than happy with this collection, and it's a particular delight having it on Switch ready for both solo play on the go and multiplayer tabletop action at a moment's notice.