Rejoice, all ye children of the 70’s and 80’s, with memories of lining up quarters along those Centipede, Asteroids, and Super Breakout machines. No global leaderboards, no online cheats. Just you, a pocketful of coins, and the exciting possibility of your three initials dominating the high score screen for the admiration of the entire town. (That’s where I was lucky to have a name like L I Z.)

If still you’ve got some Atari love in you, you’ll be taken with the fab new Atari Arcarde powered by Duo, which I imagine could be quite the hot holiday gift this year.

Atari partnered with Discovery Bay Toys to give a real joystick/button
console to power the Atari’s
Greatest Hits suite of gaming apps. You just pop your iPad 1 or 2
into the console, lock it in, and get ready to watch your kids fight
over who gets to play first.

Should you need help, I love that the actual manuals are included
digitally, with the same swanky Carter-era illustrations.

A few things to know: App pack includes Missile Command for free, but
after that you pay $.99 a game. It’s a wiser move to just fork over
$9.99 for the entire suite of 99 games–which isn’t quiiiite 99 games.
(Pong in itself is a 4-pack, Asteroids is a 4-pack and so on.) I also
find that the joystick works a little better to control the arcade mode games
than the home console games, like Hangman. But that’s okay, because as
charming as retro Hangman is for about six seconds, it’s really the
arcade games you’ll want to spend time with.

That said, it’s an awesome little time-waster, and if you’ve got a crazy
Atari fan on your holiday list, one of these on a desk at work could make
someone the most popular person at the office. –Liz

Find the new Atari
Arcarde powered by Duo for the iPad from Discovery Bay Games online at their website or from Target.com. You can download the Atari’s

Greatest Hits from the app store, with or without the joystick.