Videogame Review, MegaMania for the Atari 5200 Console (w/ Best’s Gold 5200 Joystick)

Videogame Review, MegaMania for the Atari 5200 Console (w/ Best’s Gold 5200 Joystick)

This game is about a nightmare where everyday objects suddenly attack you.  You’re in a ship and have to shoot dice, hamburgers, steaming irons, wedding rings, floating bowties, rolling beetles, swerving car tires and so much more when the difficulty shifts from novice to modest to expert and beyond.  It’s especially interesting to see a car tire run my ship over when the invasions get out of hand.  Are you looking for a really, really easy Atari 5200 game to control?  Well, MegaMania fits that category.  The shooter is 2-way (left and right) in a single speed for the ship as your analog joystick has vague control over the nightmare of free-floating hostilities.  Controls involve a combination of human and machine.  The Atari 5200 controller is extremely fixed, technically, because the plastic and metal aren’t going to bend in like Atari 2600 joystick handles.  So what makes the gameplay less than perfect?  You!  Yes, you.  A human isn’t a machine.  We have regrets, we get emotional, we observe things irrationally, we have feelings.  Our hands shake, our heads twitch, we shiver, we go wild.  If the controller was used by a machine instead there’d be no imperfection with 100% artificial intelligence.  Humans, humans as we are, are the imperfect elements against the fixed controller.  The joystick is precisely designed; humans aren’t precisely designed.  Gameplay in general often involves our evolutionary understanding of the situation and I’ve found myself laughing while the “nightmare” reveals more dice than I can sum numbers on.  Here I am, moving left and right, during the nightmare of persistent and irritating invasions of everyday, normal objects.  My instruction manual for MegaMania has notes for the “NIghtmare”.  Steaming irons especially have an interesting look: hot steam, floating irons, and lowering ammunition below the steamers.  A man who went through a divorce with his ex-wife would especially find the army of laser-shooting wedding rings hilarious.  The joystick has mechanical limits.  Us?  Well, not so much.  The bad dream exhibited in 8-bit-like presentation is schizophrenic, humorous, and quite alluring.  We constantly push the limits; our limbs twist and move as long as the controller is managed for gameplay rather than merely held.  What the instruction manual doesn’t teach us is how to use the joystick.  The joystick is like a metal bat: it’s a solid material that’s not likely to break.  Humans are the problematic elements which add onto the controllers.  The box shows a human being himself hanging upside down and having a partially exact facial expression.  We’re like that poor guy!  A piece of metal and plastic is a piece of metal and plastic; that never changes.  What changes is our reaction, our imagination, our free will and restrictive attitude, as the body must have the mind for gameplay as opposed to impersonally powerful electricity.  Rolling dice especially have a bright, neon, green flow in their invasion of a man’s bad dream.  The joystick doesn’t have exact taps since an imperfect human must hold a perfect device; but, the more and more I get into the gameplay, the more and more I’m in my bliss of ignorance and I soon forget that I’m even using analog for digital movements; the more I play, the less I remember my joystick’s exact degrees and angles of movement and I become even more tranced by the gameplay itself: a bad dream without a name, except for MegaMania.  Of course I can call the game lots of names and still be satisfied.