Gadgetory

I'll put it to you like this I spent a lot of time in arcades as a kid there's probably shocking to you I know actually probably be shocking if you saw how bad I am in video games but I did I grew up in arcades and so well this thing isn't exactly like my dreams of owning an arcade game back when I was a kid you know like Rick Schroder on silver spoons what was his name Ricky Stratton was that the name of the show whatever was anyway technobuffalo is on revision3 new episodes every Monday Wednesday and Friday 5 p.m. pacific time going on i'm noah from TechnoBuffalo calm thanks to the folks at thinkgeek who took an April Fool's joke made it come true it's the thinkgeek icade they sent over a unit for me to put together and try out it is basically what it is is it's a Bluetooth controller arcade-style controller joystick eight buttons and then it's this that little wooden cabinet here with a little holder for your iPad and so what you do is you slide your iPad in and you pair it with the icade it's actually made by a company called ion audio who's made a bunch of a USB based audio peripherals that kind of stuff but you pair the unit with your iPad it works with ipad 1 or ipad 2 and you download this app the Atari greatest hits here and the app comes with one game for free I guess it rotates but when I downloaded the app became with missile command for free and then the other games are 99 cents per 4 pack or you can get all the games 100 games for fifteen bucks 1499 in-app purchases and these are old classic Atari arcade games and also Atari 2600 games i'll zoom in a little bit here and then what you can do is you can play the games using the ik and i'll tell you what if your retro gamer or you know your retro gamer ooh as kids from what i've read some people have kids like this thing or you know whatever it is you're into these old atari games this is fun stuff the unit itself is a hundred bucks ninety nine dollars which is kind of expensive frankly for what it is but it works pretty well my own bad Missile Command skills notwithstanding this game that i remember this game from there's this place near where I grew up called Malibu Graham free it was a go-cart track and they had a huge arcade inside and on Saturday mornings they had a thing where you could pay whatever it was like ten bucks and you got unlimited gaming and like a free coke for like three hours or something and it was just full of junior high elementary junior high high school-age nerds all boys there were like two girls that ever shut up there and it was good times and this is one of the games they had there and this thing was hard this actually had a trackpad or trackball rather on the original here obviously on the icade you've got your joystick with your fire buttons but I cade unit works well unfortunately it's only compatible right now with this entire Greatest Hits app and while there are a lot of cool games on the App not you know whoops not all of the games that i would i would really like to see her i mean this thing is just begging for pac-man miss pac-man don't have that what you do get got Missile Command you've got centipede and millipede asteroids asteroids deluxe and then some of the older Atari games the the vector based games battlezone Black Widow Crystal Castles I was a fun game again another track ball game ah gravatar Liberator lunar lander major havoc course palm have Red Baron space duel super breakout tempest another awesome game warlords and they're back to missile command and so whether the games had you know trackballs of joysticks or whatnot you know the commands are mapped out to work the responsiveness is pretty good I'll show you asteroids here and Astros you can use either with the joystick or just with the buttons the original game was a just with the buttons and you had the five buttons for rotate left right hyperspace thrust and fire original graphics original sound original mad skills this game 1979 make it 1 30 irony want to add that up 32 years old that's crazy but good stuff if you're a retro gaming fan and then if you go back also a ton of a ton of Atari 2600 games and so a lot of times in these four packs you get you know you get a couple of each you get on well this one adventure for pack is just the console games but some of these you get a console game and and arcade games together so here's circus Atari 27 gamer had that game as a kid that was fun so you get the arcade game super breakout and then you get a breakout circus Atari and off the wall for the council and you can see here the old graphics man you kids you young whippersnappers with your ps3's you don't know how good you have it because this is what I played back in the day but pretty cool pretty fun stuff the games work well the ports are really nice the controls generally work well they're kind of loud the buttons are pretty loud but they're responsive the joystick has kind of like a clicking action to it it's also kind of noisy and pretty loose so not you know the most precise awesome joystick ever but it's got a pretty good feel the the retro arcade ball there is great but again it just it really makes me want to play pac-man or miss pac-man ah the website on ion audio com and on thinkgeek says that you know they're working with developers to to map more games to these controls to develop games for the ik but again right now it's only the Atari app so hundred bucks for the console or for the arcade cabinet if you will 15 bucks for all the Atari games and that's not to mention the price the iPad not cheap but a pretty cool works pretty well you know the back you hear and the nice retro graphics and then on the back I mean all this really is is some compressed wood with the decals on the side I might got a little wobble to it I just put this together over the weekend comes with an Allen wrench it's like assembling a piece of ikea furniture you know took about 15 minutes put together not a big deal one thing though that I don't like is that the unit is Bluetooth powered and so I mean is battery powered rather for the bluetooth so there's actually no dock connector near this is just a piece of plastic with nothing there it just holds the thing in place so i was expecting there be some kind of a docking station to keep your ipad charged or if they're very least a pass-through for your ipad cable to keep it charged while you're playing but there's not there's an AC port on the back of the unit but no we see after control the ik comes with two double A batteries to play it's got the little fo the power light years behind the full quarter slot were just kind of fun but you know so all in all bang for your buck wise no it's not a good value but it's fun if you've got the money to spend or you want to get somebody you know a retro gaming fanatic a cool present especially if they already have an ipad or ipad 2 it's a fun thing so it's a thumbs up on the ik thumbs down on the price what are you gonna do it's the icade from ion audio and thinkgeek again hundred bucks works of tards greatest hits would love to see it work with some other programs because I here I'll take you to them I was playing some centipede on or millipede on the 2600 here and this is the kind of thing where it's really you know it's really the retro factor that's going to get you because the graphics here are are nothing to write home about in today's day and age that's for sure you see my battery's running out there I get the charge of the thing but the old graphics and then atari 2600 I'll tell you what come a long way doom gun place of my adventure they have adventure on this thing go capture the microdot anyway there you go good stuff more information available over at thinkgeek com thanks to those folks percent of the review loop with you unit over I'm gonna see if I can break my high score protect my Buffalo taking a trip back to my childhood I'm dawn crab it's much much more over on technobuffalo calm and 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