You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: The worst 5 video game consoles failed miserably and we never hear about them

in #gaming5 years ago

The Atari 5200 was released before the Nintendo Entertainment System and was dead before the NES reached North America so Nintendo wasn't really a factor. It had two big problems. 1) The controllers were truly terrible and unreliable and 3) Atari insisted on releasing basically the same games it had released on the 2600. They weren't putting much into the development of new games, they were just slightly improving the old ones. Technically, the system was pretty decent. Basically identical hardware as the Atari 8-bit computer line so roughly equivalent to a Commodore 64 or the NES for that matter.

Sort:  

IS its controller is that thing with Numpad in it? (The image in the post.)

Yeah... They were uncomfortable to hold but what made them bad was that they were analog and they were non self-centering. In other words, if you moved it left it stayed left until you moved it right. There's nothing necessarily wrong with those features but most of the games of the time were designed with digital joysticks that centered themselves in mind. Then there's the fact that they tended to break pretty easily. If you find a used 5200, chances are the joysticks won't work (at least in certain directions).

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.31
TRX 0.12
JST 0.033
BTC 64009.76
ETH 3148.04
USDT 1.00
SBD 3.91