Now that the miniature recreation console development has already lined many of the largest gadgets from Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, we’re beginning to enter extra area of interest territory. The Atari 400 Mini isn’t a rerelease of the corporate’s most recognizable console (that’d be the 2600). And it isn’t filled with family names. However that’s additionally a part of what makes it so fascinating — the little gadget is a cute, playful strategy to discover a really particular and formative area of interest of online game historical past.
Like its contemporaries, the 400 Mini is a shrunken-down model of the unique. Which means a small field in a really Nineteen Seventies shade of beige plastic, with a keyboard and cartridge slot which are purely decorative. I recognize simply how retro this factor appears to be like; even the included HDMI and energy cords are beige. It has 5 USB ports (4 on the entrance, one on the again), an HDMI port, and USB-C port for energy. There’s one purposeful energy button on the rear, coupled with a bit purple gentle to let you realize it’s on. You additionally get one basic Atari joystick, which has been outfitted with a USB plug and the sneaky addition of some additional buttons, together with a shoulder button and a clickable circle across the precise stick.
It is a plug-and-play machine, so setup is exceedingly simple. It doesn’t hook up with the web, and the visible settings are fairly normal. There are two choices: the 4:3 mode shows video games of their unique side ratio, whereas “pixel excellent” mode renders the pixels as squares. You even have the choice so as to add digital scanlines to mimic the expertise of taking part in on a CRT show. Apart from that, there’s not a lot to it. You scroll by way of video games in alphabetical order, and it has console-level save slots, so you possibly can pause and save your progress at any level whereas taking part in. All of it works effectively sufficient, although it took me a while to get a deal with on navigating the menu with a giant joystick.
The extra necessary half is the video games themselves. The 400 Mini has 25 built-in video games spanning Atari’s 8-bit period. That features anticipated titles like Asteroids and Centipede, in addition to barely extra obscure releases just like the nautical-themed shooter Wavy Navy and Hover Bovver, Jeff Minter’s recreation about reducing lawns with a stolen lawnmower. The emulation is strong, and I used to be stunned by how effectively a few of these video games stood up. I had by no means performed Crystal Castles earlier than — a platformer the place a bear tries to flee a collection of magical mazes — however I ended up spending hours taking part in with my eight-year-old daughter, passing the joystick backwards and forwards. Equally, area sim Star Raiders II stays extremely thrilling all these years later, and I used to be very comfortable to find Airball, a fantasy maze the place you play as a bouncing bubble.
It’s a well-curated record, and I discovered mainly every part — except for the dead-simple Basketball — nonetheless playable by trendy requirements. The gathering does a terrific job of encompassing simply what this {hardware} was able to. And in contrast to most related mini consoles, the 400 Mini has room for growth. The assorted USB ports allow you to join a wide range of joysticks and keyboards, and you can even stick in a flash drive to sideload video games. That opens up quite a lot of potentialities, particularly contemplating how strong the Atari homebrew scene is.
That capacity to develop the machine can also be necessary as a result of the 400 Mini has a stunning quantity of competitors. It’s actually not that arduous to seek out methods to play Atari video games proper now. The corporate launched a recreation of the 2600 final 12 months that may play outdated cartridges, and the superb Atari 50 assortment not solely has an expansive record of video games but in addition provides historic context with its interactive documentary format. With that in thoughts, a $119 mini console could possibly be a troublesome promote. However the bookshelf-worthy design mixed with its flexibility would possibly simply push it over the sting — as long as you will have a yearning for some Star Raiders.