Title: Atari 50: The Wider World of Atari
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $7.99
Release Date: 09/26/2024

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Prelude

In this new timeline of games, Digital Eclipse returns to the 2022 GOTY winner, Atari 50 with new games, stories, and materials to share! Is this paid DLC update worth the cash, or are you best sticking with the stock games? I rarely cover DLC for the site, but considering the aforementioned game was the title that got me feeling a lot more excited about modern game compilations, I couldn’t pass up the chance to pick the DLC up and give my thoughts on it.

When it comes to the timeline itself, you have a decent selection of new interviews. A lot of stuff filling in about the 70s era, some stuff about homebrew and the graphic design process, and a fun peek into how prototypes were discovered and later reissued officially. It was neat to see some of the free update games get put on the timeline, too.

Presentation

Pretty similar to that of Atari 50 itself; this is just another timeline in the collection after all, and it integrates very seamlessly with the other ones. You have some more games added, all with the same great display options and filters from the base game, and a lot more cool manual/art scans. You have some more documentary videos here, which provided a fun batch of content to watch. Nothing earth shattering or anything, just more fun history that fills in the gaps between some years that weren’t fully covered in Atari 50; namely parts of the 70s and the 2005 homebrew scene.

Audio sounds mostly as it should, barring a few exceptions I’ll note in the system breakdown.

Gameplay

Like with my main Atari 50 review, I prefer breaking these down by system, rather than game by game, especially considering that a lot of these are incredibly simplistic titles with games I’ve covered before. Unfortunately, a good chunk of em are 2600 games, with no 7800, Lynx or Jaguar additions for any kind of in-depth content. Still, we have some pretty fun games here, and during my time with them, I also had to seek an answer to a long-burning question: did they fix the Steam Cloud integration with the Arcade high-score saving? Let’s find out together!

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ARCADE– The bulk of the new additions here are a bunch of the weirder, monochromatic late 70s games. We get Skydiver, which I praised in the Evercade collection, plus a bunch of oddballs like Football and Destroyer. But the big highlights here are Berzerk and Frenzy, games obtained from Stern by Atari, and I immediately went to see if the Steam Cloud bug that plagued the base edition impacted these newer games as well.

For those unaware, if you uninstall Atari 50 and reinstall it on Steam, your saves via the cloud will still contain the timeline progress, save states, and stuff for the newer games, but not the local high-scores for the arcade titles. Having spent a good half dozen hours in Tempest, this irked me to have it all be lost without warning, and kinda made me just rebuy it on Xbox so I didn’t have to worry about losing the saves if I had to free up storage space. So does this DLC update fix the bug?

The answer is unfortunately, no. It appears the issue with the Steam Cloud is that the saves for the Arcade high scores are .bin files, and those seem to have been excluded from the cloud backup for whatever reason. Hopefully this can get fixed before DLC 2 hits, as it has been the only longstanding issue with Atari 50 on Steam since launch.

Still, back to the Arcade games. Berzerk and Frenzy are really great scorechasers, with fast paced gameplay and tense action, emulating just as they should. These also have save states, so you can save your high scores that way without worrying about the Steam Cloud. (since save states are backed up properly) I wish another Stern title was thrown in, but those two were the most popular, so I’m not surprised that those were the two they picked.

For the other arcade titles, highlights for me were Avalanche, a game that controls brilliantly with the Steam Deck’s trackpads and plays like a dream on it, and Skydiver, which is just as much fun as I had on Atari Arcade 1 for Evercade. Unfortunately, this port has a very strange bug where playing any game in it and then quitting out will glitch the highscore to a laughably impossible 900K total, so you can’t even play this one for score. Hopefully this nasty scoring bug gets fixed rather quickly.

Red Baron is a cool vector game, though the high score initials screen is buggy in this port, only working in the backwards direction with the left joystick, with the other direction just not registering on the screen at all. Still the core game itself seems to play fine and manages to be a really darn fun addition that fits in nicely with the other vector games. Super Bug is a decent little driving game with a gear shift system, and Football manages to be an absolutely confusing mess I still couldn’t get the hang of even with the added context here.

ATARI 2600– A bunch of oddballs here. You get two ports of Berzerk, plus some fun obscurities like Atari Video Cube, Desert Falcon, and more. With that said, most of the interesting 2600 games were available in the base package/free update 1, so there really isn’t much here that I found all that interesting to play, save for Desert Falcon and Off the Wall, an incredibly fun take on Breakout. Once again, the timeline info is where these games truly shine, and for that extra historical info, Digital Eclipse nailed it.

They even went and added some of the games from the free update to the new timeline, meaning gems like Aquaventure and Save Mary have a nice little section! I also have to say, it was pretty enjoyable comparing the differences between the original Berzerk port, and the new 2023 port included here, and I really found them both to be shockingly good considering the year that the original port launched.

ATARI 5200– One game this time around, and it’s Berzerk on the 5200. This port is pretty cool, being a nice showcase for the system and even having sampled speech, but I can’t tell if the speech is glitched in this port or if the emulated footage I see of this port online suffers from emulation errors. In Atari 50, the speech is really strange and muffled sounding, while comparing it to online gameplay videos of the port, it sounds a lot easier to understand.

Honestly, in 50 I was worried my game was broken since the speech just sounds really crackly and annoying in a way I can’t describe. Thankfully you can disable the sampled speech, and this plays a pretty darn good version of Berserk. The fourth in this DLC, in fact, but still, a good game is a good game.

ATARI 8 BIT– Also one game this time around, a computer port of Avalanche. Despite being a paddle game, it still controls pretty good on Steam Deck with the paddles, and is well ported! The smaller playfield feels a bit cramped, but makes for a faster experience than the Arcade version, and I really dug it. I like the Arcade original quite a lot too, but this is a fine port, with not much else to note about it at all, really. Odd how this was the lone addition to the Computer catalog, but at least they picked a very fun scorechaser.

Conclusion

Ultimately, just like with the base set of games, Wider World of Atari absolutely shines through the historical information and extra content provided in the timeline, and the new arcade games here are still pretty darn fun! You can’t go wrong with the two Stern classics, that’s for sure. When it comes to the other games though, nothing in particular stands out as a must buy, which makes me more bummed we didn’t get something more in depth from the future consoles to hold us over

Still, for $8, the historical info and timeline contents are more than worth the asking price, and I was very happy to finally play a good version of Berzerk to see what all the fuss was about with it. It also led me to discover a very fun hidden 2600 Gem in the form of Off the Wall, and rediscovering Avalanche and having it control smooth as silk on Steam Deck was a lot of fun too. Shame the Steam Cloud bug wasn’t fixed, and the oddities with Avalanche Arcade/Red Baron with their scoring is weird, but hopefully that all gets polished up in time for the next DLC, which has a more interesting tale behind it…

I give the Atari 50: The Wider World of Atari DLC an 8 out of 10.