Shaggy the Atarian

DANG IT THOMAS, JUST READ THE BLOG POST. IT'S ACCURATE AND ALL IS WELL!!! NOW, WHO WANTS TO TELL ME ABOUT THEIR BEST ATARI MEMORY? E.T. WAS DOPE, AMIRITE?

"It doesn't answer anything about your actual question, so Mission Accomplished"

In hardware related news, the Exa-Arcadia platform was originally announced in Feb. 2018(a couple of months after the initial Tacobox unveil), began shipping to Japanese buyers last month and the company is preparing pre-orders for US/EU. It uses PC-based hardware (not sure if it's Intel or AMD), proprietary game carts, have signed on over 20 game developers and has been tested in a variety of cabinet types (something important for an arcade conversion kit). They didn't crowdfund $3 million to get their project off of the ground, technically started after the Tacobox was supposed to get going, and people are already enjoying the platform in Japan. Atari on the other hand had an emergency press release today, so that's something!

But then Atari will only be run by Fred...

I'm sure that losing your chief system architect & his company during one of the most important phases of the hardware's development was totally according to plan and will not result in any problems or delays whatsoever. Fine tuning! Wait, why would you have a panic when you've laid waste to all of the TROLLS and HATERS with an incredible video showing an LED going on and off?

Nice little distraction from the bombshell news that once again, Atari doesn't pay up and has to scramble to save face (I'm friends with someone who was working for Human Head Studios a few years back (he's no longer there) and said that they went through the same thing on the game Minimum. Atari didn't live up to their obligations and left the company with worthless French penny stocks). One would think that Atari being the "deadbeat dad" of video games should tank their remaining value and shake even the most faithful of cultists, but I'm guessing that the Werner Bros. are fapping over a cordless board making an LED turn on and will completely ignore just how bad it is to lose your principal architect just a couple of months before backers are supposed to be receiving production units. There are many hurdles that Atari still has to go through to get a market-ready device tested, and that's not going to happen quickly. I hope that one guy who said his wife would leave him over the VCS not shipping by March is getting himself a good divorce lawyer, as he's screwed.

Let's tune in live to VCShill HQ:

King of the Road is being rebranded with the Hot Wheels license and has been paired down to six players instead of eight. I've been waiting on getting a final cabinet shot before running a story, but there is this trailer that was posted last week:

The growing number of game streaming services reminds me of the silliness that is taking place with video streams. Something that the guys at Red Letter Media hilariously bashed. "Well guys, I signed up for a 198 streaming services at a cost of $26,000 a month. I sure hope that my little TV here can handle all that data."

That or he's a really smooth talker

I stand corrected. Interesting that he was kept after Atari launched the Feargal lawsuit action.

Raising legitimate questions about a product like this and pointing out Atari's constant lack of poor customer service isn't trolling, pissing or moaning. I'd think that a company like Atari outright lying to their customers, over and over again, is a cause for concern and worth pointing out. For the trolling there is, it's in good fun. But it's naive to think that Atari hasn't released today's "updates" because of customers demanding to know if the thing is legitimately in production or not.

The VCS will be truly retro and make you have to play games like Borderlands 2 in a tiny window to achieve 30 FPS. Price without the power!

It will be fun to set the VCS next to an Xbox One S, or Switch in handheld mode and watch both of those platforms just decimate the VCS. Much less the PS4Pro/XBX or decent PC rig.

Hmm, speaking of that, I notice that Atari made titles like Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, Hover Strike and Club Drive are missing. I guess they could have been sold to someone like Piko Interactive; otherwise I'm now curious who owns these games. And because I've been slacking in duties, tacos:

Hmm, I had thought that they had Robo-Squash, Kung Food and Power Factor, but even then it wasn't much. Guess that shows why we've never had a Lynx revival. It's really odd that they maintain the copyright for unfinished/unreleased games like Akka Arrh, Black Belt and Cloud 9 though. Or Frisky Tom on the 5200? What's the point of touting that, apart from just padding the list?

Thanks Joseph, I will be enjoying my Amico and my Switch, with their loads of unique, interesting and fun games, while you touch yourself over having a $300 Atari Vault and artifact compression streaming machine.

A few years ago, some guys in Michigan came together and put some pinball machines together. They claimed to have obtained the license from Fox for Predator, and had a working game to show. They took over $1 million in pre-orders before vanishing; turned out they didn't understand how to run a business and lied about the license. It all looked and sounded legit, but a lot of people had to lose a lot of money before they figured out that it was a scam. In terms of Atari, I suppose you could say that many here have looked at their history, seen many other scams out there and are jaded. Atari SA knows licensing really well, but they haven't had any direct experience in creating a piece of hardware and learning from that process. The Flashback's were all licensed out to someone else, so they didn't have to work on those details. Then you had the Gameband come along, a successfully funded campaign that was quietly killed; Feargal Mac was working on that and the VCS then had their falling out, so Atari had to scramble and found Rob Wyatt. Then they changed a bunch of specs, but people who know hardware have stated that it shouldn't take as long as it has for the VCS to be a reality already. Given Atari playing coy, banning people, lying about interviews, deflecting, delaying, ignoring requests for info and not living up to their end of the IGG terms, I think that's where skepticism turned into belief as to this not shipping. For a product like this, they should have working boards that are being tested right now, at this point. That wouldn't be a hard picture to take or video to take. Instead, we get someone holding a circuit board - something that should have been shown months and months ago. Not 60 days before your system is shipping out to backers. It may still ship, but I'd rather play the Doubting Thomas at this point so I'm not like one of the Predator pre-order guys. Of course, for me to buy a game console or a PC, it needs to offer content on that device that I can't get anywhere else. As such, my money's on the Amico. Sure, that could also not ship, but that is still 1 year out from it's release date, and they've shown original games, remakes, and let people play and handle the console at E3. Atari setup something in a box in a dark room near E3, then controlled the narrative about what could come out (and still fumbled the ball with all of the unconsole nonsense). Take that all for what you will

They probably would have done better to go with that plan from 2015 to rebrand a bunch of existing tablets & phablets with their logo, test out some UI shells there and see how well that would have done, then decide if a Super Flashback would have been worth it.

I dunno, I think they were panicking after The Register article dropped and figured that they had better do something to prevent losing support from one of the few partners they actually have on board with it. You can be sure that someone involved (at AMD or PowerA) were probably blasting them with angry phone calls after that. If anything, I imagine they're wiping sweat from their brow as opposed to having a laugh (on the other hand, some VCShills think that this offers total proof that this will be a yuge success, so they are LOLing and high fiving in their threads, not realizing just how underwhelming it all is).

I used to do sales at a company where the finances were in shambles, but they did an amazing job at convincing the public (and those of us in sales) that things were going gangbusters when they weren't. I was surprised at how long they were able to stay afloat by doing so; it doesn't solve the problem, but it does slow the drain circling down a bit in the hopes of that "hail mary" sale. Atari's behavior is similar in some ways to what I experienced there - putting on a good facade with the CEO jetting around to trade shows while both customers and manufacturers are calling, demanding to know what is going on with the thousands of dollars they spent (100% up-front) for their product that still hadn't shipped. Turned out that the finances were in shambles, so the management would wait to pay for the product at the absolute last possible moment, despite giving customers the impression that when they paid for it, the payment was sent. I think that the IGG thing was the hail mary save, but what will really be telling is how many sales they'll rack up in April 2020 and what the return ratio will be. If the board was a last minute rush, I'm pretty sure they'll experience a high failure rate. So place your bets - assuming the VCS actually ships - How long until the first "Red Fuji of Death" pops up on the internet?

Well that wasn't so hard, was it? Oh wait, it took tons of questions, bans, mainstream articles, guys claiming that their wives will leave them, and other assorted outcrying just to get a company show a populated PCB only two months before it's supposed to be shipping. I'm certain that if there was no outcry from here and other parts of the internet, these updates wouldn't have happened and backers would still be left wondering what is going on. Atari still violated the terms of IGG to keep backers up-to-date; lied about various other promises through this whole process. Of course, it shows that terms only mean something for the corporations and not for the individual for violation of the rules ("sorry," no refunds). They've treated their customers with disdain(excepting those that just praise Atari no matter what), which shouldn't be so quickly swept under the rug. It's not "too much" to ask seeing the machine working in the shell, running the software and working with the controllers, but I'm sure the VCShills will revert back to their nonsensical excuse about how Apple handles hardware. Antstream is better than the nothing of the Vault, but in reading that review posted from a few pages back, it's another sad joke in this saga. Google Stadia and Apple Arcade have specially curated content for their services. It's quite apparent at this point that Atari has no one of any consequence working on content for this machine.

For some bizarre reason, I keep seeing these pop up in collections. I know some guys local to me that have three of them. And here I was thinking it was a super rarity But yeah, Dexter that bad boy post-haste. Did anyone tell Brandon that the console with certified remakes of classic games is called the Intellivision Amico? Otherwise, I don't understand why VCShills are always wishcasting for remakes of relatively obscure games? Why set yourself up for obvious disappointment like that?