What's your favorite home console of the early video game age?

[Mandalore76]

archbrix said:

My love for games was born in the arcades and except for Space Invaders and a couple of other exceptions, the 2600's ports were lackluster and often atrocious. While I do give it credit for original titles at the time like Pitfall and Adventure, I never wanted one and just found myself back in the arcades plopping in quarters.

It wasn't until Colecovision that I could actually play great arcade ports at home that were leaps and bounds better than anything on the 2600 or Intellivision (hadn't played a 5200 yet). Centipede, Gorf, Galaxian, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Q*Bert... so many great arcade titles. I still never had one and I didn't like the controller, but none of the home console controllers were good to me until the NES. Needless to say, Colecovision gets my vote.

Top 5 Colecovison games:

1. Ms Pac Man
2. Pac Man
3. Frogger
4. Mario Bros
5. Burgertime

Pac-Man, Ms Pac-Man & Mario Bros weren't released on the Colecovision.  You could play the Atari cartridges of those games on the Colecovision using the Expansion Module #1 (which was essentially an Atari 2600 being powered by the Colecovision).  Collectorvision ended up making a homebrew release of Mario Bros for Colecovision in 2009.  However, Atarisoft was indeed developing a nice looking version of Pac-Man (and Ms. Pac-Man) to release on the Colecovision back in the day, but the North American Video Game Crash of 1983 and it's effect on both Atari and Coleco led to that never commercially releasing. 

I would have loved to have this version as a kid in 83'/84'.

Last edited by Mandalore76 - on 08 June 2022