Now that the miniature recreation console development has already coated 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 stuffed with family names. However that’s additionally a part of what makes it so attention-grabbing — the little gadget is a cute, playful technique 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. Meaning a small field in a really Seventies shade of beige plastic, with a keyboard and cartridge slot which are purely decorative. I admire simply how retro this factor seems; 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 practical energy button on the rear, coupled with just a little crimson mild to let it’s on. You additionally get one traditional 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 system, so setup is exceedingly simple. It doesn’t connect with the web, and the visible settings are fairly commonplace. There are two choices: the 4:3 mode shows video games of their authentic side ratio, whereas “pixel good” 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. Aside 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 properly 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 slicing lawns with a stolen lawnmower. The emulation is strong, and I used to be shocked by how properly 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 forwards and backwards. Equally, house sim Star Raiders II stays extremely thrilling all these years later, and I used to be very completely happy to find Airball, a fantasy maze the place you play as a bouncing bubble.
It’s a well-curated listing, and I discovered mainly every little thing — aside from the dead-simple Basketball — nonetheless playable by trendy requirements. The gathering does an awesome job of encompassing simply what this {hardware} was able to. And in contrast to most related mini consoles, the 400 Mini has room for enlargement. The varied USB ports allow you to join a wide range of joysticks and keyboards, and you may also stick in a flash drive to sideload video games. That opens up numerous potentialities, particularly contemplating how sturdy the Atari homebrew scene is.
That capability to increase the system can be necessary as a result of the 400 Mini has a stunning quantity of competitors. It’s actually not that onerous to seek out methods to play Atari video games proper now. The corporate launched a recreation of the 2600 final yr that may play outdated cartridges, and the superb Atari 50 assortment not solely has an expansive listing of video games but in addition provides historic context with its interactive documentary format. With that in thoughts, a $119 mini console might be a troublesome promote. However the bookshelf-worthy design mixed with its flexibility may simply push it over the sting — as long as you may have a yearning for some Star Raiders.