The Atari 7800+ is a no-frills glimpse into a forgotten gaming era

There are better versions of these games

Since I’ve never owned an Atari 7800 cartridge, Atari sent me eight titles from its current line of retro cartridges to test alongside the updated hardware. This included a mix of original titles released in the ’80s and “homebrew elevation” cartridges that the company says are now “getting a well-deserved official Atari release.”

The titles I had to test were definitely a step up from the few dozen Atari 2600 games that I’ve accumulated and grown to tolerate over the years. A game like Asteroids Deluxe on the 7800 doesn’t quite match the vector graphics of the arcade original, but it comes a lot closer than the odd, colorful blobs of Asteroids on the 2600. The same goes for Frenzy on the 7800, which is a big step up from Berzerk on the 2600.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel that these arcade ports are better experienced these days on one of the many MAME-based or FPGA-based emulation boxes that can do justice to the original quarter munchers. And the more original titles I’ve sampled mostly ended up feeling like pale shadows of the NES games I knew and loved.

The new Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest (which is included with the 7800+ package) comes across as an oversimplified knock-off of Adventure Island, for instance. And the rough vehicular combat of Fatal Run is much less engaging than the NES port of Atari’s own similar but superior Roadblasters arcade cabinet. The one exception to this rule that I found was Ninja Golf, a wacky, original mix of decent golfing and engaging run-and-punch combat.

Of course, I’m not really the target audience here. The ideal Atari 7800+ buyer is someone who still has nostalgic memories of the Atari 7800 games they played as a child and has held onto at least a few of them (and/or bought more modern homebrew cartridges) in the intervening decades.

If those retro gamers want an authentic but no-frills box that will upscale those cartridges for an HDTV, the Atari 7800+ will do the job and look cute on your mantel while it does. But any number of emulation solutions will probably do the job just as well, and with more features to boot.