Oh, that's cool - I haven't gotten to Vectrex yet, I mainly messed around with Atari stuff tonight.
Just played for about an hour, had a pretty good time - here's some thoughts about some of the random stuff I played (I dabbled with stuff not listed as well, but these stuck out to me as notable):
Atari 2600-
Aquaventure - Probably my favorite game I played tonight - complex enough to be engaging, but pretty simple concept - dive deep to collect a treasure chest, then go back up, dodging and shooting fish along the way. Level gets deeper as you go on. Fun! I recommend checking it out. The Emulation Station description said it was apparently unreleased, which is a shame, because it's quite good.
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Asteroids - This is the sort of thing I thought of about the 2600. If it was all I could play at home at the time, I could understand wanting this, but it absolutely pales in comparison to the arcade version. It's not quite as bad as 2600 Pac-Man compared to that game's arcade version, but I was underwhelmed to say the least about 2600 Asteroids.
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Battlezone - Honestly impressed me. Years and years ago I read the book
Racing the Beam, and this game seems like a serious accomplishment considering how limited the 2600 hardware was. Helps that it's quite fun, too.
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Blackjack - The Game & Watch version has better graphics! lmao
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Burgertime - Same as Asteroids, above, though a little better than that in that it feels pretty good, though the collision detection is a bit tougher to read than in the arcade version, sadly. Still, I'd have been happier with this than either Asteroids or Pac-Man.
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Cakewalk - Fun game that reminds me of the Mario Bros. Game & Watch. You have to catch cakes as they come flying across conveyor belts, preventing them from hitting the floor. Some stuff you have to dodge, like utensils. Weirdly, I saw a baby on the conveyor belt at one point lol
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Carnival by Sega (Manufactured by Coleco for use on the Atari 2600) - Had to play this given the company alphabet soup on the box art, it's just a Space Invaders clone (a competent one, mind you, but pretty boring to see after seeing all those disparate companies on the box lol)
Atari 5200I can't seem to get games to launch? Although I did bring up a keypad at one point, maybe this system would be better played on a computer with a keyboard attached, not my Steam Deck.
Atari 7800Asteroids Deluxe - now we're talking. Excellent version of the arcade game. Yes, at this point I'd just boot up the arcade game in MAME, but I'd have been very happy with this at the time at home.
Dig Dug - Good, very playable port, though I think the NES version is higher quality, but just by a hair.
Galaga - I actually liked this quite a bit, and need to boot up the NES version to see which I prefer. Either way, not knowing immediately upon booting it up is a good sign haha
Colecovision and Intellivision games wouldn't boot. No idea why! Thinking about it, I instinctively unzipped every rom I downloaded, including these two systems and 5200, but maybe these systems have to stay zipped like MAME games? I just downloaded them and put them in the appropriate folders. If anyone has any general tips about how to get these to run, I'll play them too!
As you can see, I'm just kind of poking around at things in alphabetical order on the rom list lol. I'll be poking at these games more over the next two months for sure, because I enjoyed myself, even if some of my old impressions are holding, I'm more patient now that I'm older and appreciative of more primitive experiences (I can't imagine if I'd encountered a Game & Watch unit in the 90s that I'd have cared one whit about it, for example, and yet now I love them).
EDIT: What the heck, your badge picture didn't load on the computer I typed this post on originally
bonesnapdeez lol. Weird. In any case - you've probably been in the same room as myself and my now wife, who took me to that exact expo as a gift back when we were just dating haha. It was a good time! Perhaps we even interacted in the retro console room they had set up, which was also the first time I played a Turbografx on real hardware (I never knew anyone who had one as a kid).