Atari Mania is an interesting game that plays off the nostalgia of ye olden days while applying the construct of a Wario World mini-game backbone. While the latter of those two brings some of the wackiest types of mini-games, such as trying to pick someone’s nose or trying to catch the paw of a dog to make it happy, Atari Mania uses its library of old games from the Atari 2600 days to breathe in some new life from an ancient gaming experience. I have to give iLLOGIKA Studios some creative credit for finding a way to make remedial, early gameplay interesting. It’s like a whole new 80s ball game.
Let’s get it going.
Story
You play as an Atari caretaker who is left to run and keep up with what could only be described as an Atari Museum. In the same vein as Night at the Museum, the characters from the 2600 game, such as a pistol-slinging cowboy named Pete and a giant millipede named Milli (and what I believe is the Crystal Castles bear) hang around to cause some trouble and to spread some personality into the storyline. When the trouble becomes more than usual and black pixels start showing up to ingest characters like Pete and Milli to turn them evil, our main caretaker must do just that – take care of things.
This story does a good job of incorporating famous characters and titles from Atari’s golden era into likable partners that make the game a bit goofier. Captured in true 80s early 8-bit style, the game puts you in this old world and breathes new life and personality through its basic storytelling. It’s a goofy game that has more dad jokes than freshly delivered comedy, and strangely enough, it all works in the story’s scheme of things. It certainly is enough to entertain you as you progress from point A to point B in the gameplay.
Huge kudos must be given to iLLOGIKA Studios for putting a hodge-podge of weird Atari characters together and forming a cohesive and somewhat adorable trip down memory lane. It’s fun and not too deep or serious.
Mini Games for your Gameplay
As previously mentioned at the beginning, Wario World provided a lot of inspiration and structure to the Atari Mania blueprint. As you progress through the story, you run into giant black pixelated blob creatures that suck you into a multi-level mini-game marathon. You have to traverse through several levels of mini-games to get to an end boss fight. What’s unique about this structure is that the games are comprised of pieces and parts of actual early Atari games. For example, there is a level where you have a mixture of Warlords and Adventure. With the former, you might have to defend your territory, as per the original game, or you might have to move your knight back home to their castle as other knights defend theirs. For the latter, you may have to find a key to unlock a gate or in true Adventure fashion, find the hidden area to break into a castle (that’s history, kiddos – that actually happened in the original game). Regardless of what you get, there is a beautiful mix-match with these games and Atari Mania makes the content somewhat fresh, entertaining, and at times funny as hell. This is the main crux of the gameplay and the way you progress in the game.
Now, how each level in the game works is that you solve tiny puzzles to get to those mini-game moments. Some of the puzzles require tools to get through them. For example, there is a need for a wrench to unscrew a large bolt that unlocks a bridge so that you can cross to the other side and fight a boss. The only way to obtain that wrench is by beating a previous boss. Each boss fight produces a tool. Each tool produces a new way to play the game and solve puzzles. One works into the other and vice-versa. The game also gives you a new tool so that you might explore its many areas and unlock hidden secrets. Atari Mania has a good balance of puzzles, and boss fights, and encourages you to explore what is around you. All of the above makes for an interesting main structure of gameplay.
To keep things exciting, you also have mini-mini games that are put on by mice hidden around the levels you explore. These mice provide the same sort of gaming challenge to the player as the boss fights do. The big difference is that you have to find cheese to initiate them (which is easier said than done) and you get less energy to work with during the mice fights. The energy bars you get here are usually 1-3 blocks in size, as opposed to five or so in regular fights. If you lose once, then you’ll have a significant chance of losing altogether. Another difference between the two types of fights is that the mice have fewer steps than the boss fights do. Boss fights usually have about 10-13 steps, especially in early fights. These are just 10-13 mini-games before you reach the boss. For the mice fights, you get 1-6 steps. These tiny levels help to keep motivation intact when boss fights become too frustrating. They boast your confidence that you can keep going. There’s also a good mix of mice fight mini-games, which helps to keep it all fresh.
Getting back to difficulty, the boss fights are frustrating as hell as you go further and further through the game. For example, I found myself reeling at times with the fourth boss fight. It was long, hard, and unfair at times. And that’s the name of this game, you’ll find the controls a bit wonky with how the older games are properly represented. I commend iLLOGIKA Studios for capturing the control essence of the Atari 2600, but I now understand how far control schemes and how they work have come since the late 70s and early 80s. They have come a long way. Seeing the old ways in motion again can get incredibly frustrating, and I can only imagine how a young gamer that wasn’t born during that gaming era would feel about this experience. For example, I had a dickens of a time with Pete the cowboy. He shot in angles and only in angles, which is infuriating when you’re trying to kill something in front of you. This is how things were back in the day and they add difficulty to the entire process with these new digs. That’s probably on purpose, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a lovely experience. You will find steep spiked layers of difficulty as the game progresses further and further into bosses. This might be a big turn-off for the common gamer. I have to admit, it got to me at times.
One big part of this difficulty was how your character could be hit by flying objects or how accurate you had to be with your hits. The actual contact activity was sensitive as hell. If you got too close to an object, instant fail in a mini-game. If you didn’t hit an object dead center, instant fail. It was overly sensitive at times, maybe on purpose, but it tended to make this a little unfun and unforgiving. I wish it was just a bit more flexible.
To keep you on your toes and interested beyond the frustrating mini-games and difficulty spike, the game does encourage you to seek out objects, such as game boxes and instructional manuals for old Atari games, to collect. I think it’s neat to see the old over-the-top Atari art that was far better to look at than the game it housed. It was a neat way to walk you down memory lane, while also taming some frustration. It tried to balance out with success in the discovery of these things with bouts of frustration with difficult mini-games.
Anyway, at the end of the day, the gameplay was more satisfying than furious, and the type of creativity that went into this title to use crappy Atari games to make it fun must be commended and high-fived. Having been born in the Atari days (1976), I saw these games first-hand and adored them back in the day. How they are used, twisted, pulled apart, and put back together is a kind of genius of iLLOGIKA Studios. It took a lot of effort and thought to get it to this point. Anytime you can make Atari games interesting in 2022 is a good time. Not a perfect time, but a good one.
Conclusion
iLLOGIKA Studios’ Atari Mania tugs at the heartstrings of old gamers in a good attempt to reignite interest in Atari 2600 games. The way that the game uses older titles to create mini-games is genius, if not straight from the pages of Wario World. The only caveat is that you get some of that 1980s unforgiving difficulty with it, which at times can make the game a bit unfun. It’s still a solid attempt at creating something new with the Atari brand, and certainly one you should check out.
