Gaming with Healey

Time to take out the ACs. Can’t imagine we’ll get anymore 70 degrees weather, but being New England you never know 🤨

I was going through and packing up more stuff to put in storage and came across one of my more unique game consoles. It’s the Coleco Telstar Arcade system. I bought this for $5 at the Malden Flea Market in the early 90’s. It’s triangular, brown and has paddle controllers on one side, a steering wheel and shifter on one, and a gun and holster. It uses D-cell batteries too, but also has a small jack for power (can use the Atari 2600 power supply I think) and the sound comes from the console, not the TV set. The cartridge is a triangle shape and has a game for each controller. The bottom has suction cups too. This system and its controls still work great and the gun looks pretty realistic and has no orange or colored tip that toys these days do. The hammer actually comes back when the trigger is pulled, which many light guns don’t do. In the shooting game on it you can actually shoot the guys hat off. The steering wheel of course has no feedback like new ones do and is very sensitive, but works nicely with the basic racing game that is on the cartridge. The paddle controls work well too and do the job well for the Pong knockoff game on the cartridge. One of these days I’ll hook this up again and record it. It really is a cool and strange system 😁👍👾

I found my Atari 5200 Trak-Ball controller today while packing stuff up. This thing is great and I used it when playing Centipede and Missile Command. That’s the only way to truly play these games. Can’t believe this controller was $78.88 back in the early 80’s. Bradlees had some weird pricing amounts. Glad I saved this. Colecovision also had the awesome Roller Controller which was similar to this one, but that one let you plug the controllers into it, like an extension.

It’s crazy that Sony is raising the price of the PlayStation 5, but luckily not in America. It’s a pretty crappy move still because most people in the world couldn’t get one because of the lowlife scalpers, now they’re subjected to inflation. You’d think since we’re two years in they’d lower the price a bit to get more systems into homes. Also allow one PS5 per person and require some type of authentication to deter scalping.