Atari Retro Handheld: Reviewed.

The Atari Retro Handheld is a new product from Blaze Retro who develop and manufacture their own retro products. Blaze previously distributed video game accessories, consoles, software, and handheld media devices – working with brands such as NeoGeo and Sega. Now working together with Atari they have created a new handheld, I jumped at the chance to see what this one was all about.

As I have already mentioned, this is not one of the Atgames Megadrive style handhelds, that in itself gave me hope for this product, upon receiving product I was impressed by the packaging, some people use it as a marker for the quality of what’s inside and I somewhat agree, at least its a good start. Once you get to the handheld itself, wow was my initial thought, its be designed very much in the style of the Atari VCS woody as you can see from our pictures.

It has a good weight to it, feels well-built, sturdy and has a good feel in my hands, it has a 2.4″ screen with an option for TV out via an A/V Output socket and it runs on 4 AAA batteries, so far I have had 16 hours of use from it so it seems to be good on power consumption. It really is a stunning piece of kit and come packed with 50 games. (Listed Below)

3D Tic-Tac-Toe (31 in 1), Adventure, Air-Sea Battle Asteroids, Black Jack, Bowling, Breakout, Canyon Bomber, Casino, Centipede, Circus Atari, Crystal Castles, Demons to Diamonds, Desert Falcon, Dodge ’em, Double Dunk, Fun With Numbers, Golf, Gravitar, Haunted House, Home Run, Human Cannonball, Maze Craze, Millipede, Miniature Golf, Missile Command, Night Driver, Off the Wall, Pong – Video Olympics, Quadrun, Radar Lock, Realsports Football, Realsports Tennis, Realsports Volleyball, Sprintmaster, Steeplechase, Stellar Track, Street Racer, Submarine Commander, Super Baseball, Super Breakout, Super Football, Swordquest: Earthworld, Swordquest: Fireworld, Swordquest: Waterworld, Tempest, Video Checkers, Video Chess, Video Pinball, Yar’s Revenge

So whats it like to play I hear you ask? Well its bloody good overall, surprisingly most of the games work pretty well on the small screen, some better than others obviously but that is to be expected. The controls are pretty responsive too, I have worked my way through every game on it, Asteroids, Missile Command and Yar’s Revenge are awesome and play as they do on the real hardware. The one slight grumble I have is the lack of a A/V cable being supplied with it, therefore I am unable to test the quailty of this feature, again its a minor issue as this is a handheld device so for me at least I am not overly concerned but I wanted you to know that before you decide to buy.

So who is this handheld for? I suspect diehard Atari fans will be all over it from a collectors point of view but I would suggest it’s mainly for the casual gamer, and people buying it as a gift for family and friends. It’s priced at reasonable £34.99 but if you look around you can get it cheaper than that, this is a cool system and coupled with the fact it has 50 games included it gets a thumbs up from me.