Stats from my Atari 7800 Reviews

[7800 Pro Gamer]

I've only posted a few reviews to my blog, but I've actually written reviews for quite a while. I had 51 retail 7800 reviews either written, started or outlined, and 42 homebrew games in similar states of completion. I usually take notes as I play, write an outline of ideas and then give scores. Then I come back and write the reviews hitting the notes I want to speak on. 

For my blog I'm going back and making sure my feelings haven't changed, and then I usually rewrite the review and post the better of the 2. I love having an excuse to play my favorite console and the games I would normally skip over. 

But anyway, I thought it would be fun to post some of the stats I've found in the scores. Let's start with average score. When it comes to retail games I've given more 6 out of 10s than anything else.  For homebrew games I've given more 8 out of 10s. This would suggest I like the homebrew more than retail, but let's dig deeper. 

For the 51 retail games I've looked into, I've given only 1 game a score of broken, or 2% of the games fall here. The terrible score (2-3 out of 10) was given to 5 games or 10%, 16 games got a bad score (4-5 out of 10) or 31%, 18 games got a good score (6-7 out of 10) or 35%, 11 games got great (8-9 out of 10) or 22%, and no retail games got a perfect score.  So again, the majority of games are considered good but there are almost as many "bad" games. 

Over on the homebrew side, out of 42 games 0 got the broken score, 4 games got the terrible score or 10%, 10 games got bad or 24%, 13 games got the good score or 31%, 13 games got the great score or 31%, and 2 games got the perfect score or 4%.  So while good and great share the same percentage, when broken down further there are still more 8s overall. 

Finally, when broken down to pass or fail, 22 retail games got a failing score (5 or worse) or 43.2% and 29 games got a score of 6 or greater, or 56.8%. For homebrew titles, 14 games in total fail or 33.3%, and 28 games pass or 66.7%. 

So what did this tell us about my feelings on the 7800 library?  Well I seem to like more of the library than I don't, and I rank homebrew games as higher quality in general. This could be because most homebrew games are passion projects rather than commissioned or just a job that needs done.  They also don't have a corporation breathing down their back for profits. 

The only broken game is a retail game and the only 2 "perfect" games are homebrew. While I won't get into any scores I haven't posted yet, I will say the broke game is the NTSC version of Impossible Mission, and the perfects we're Rikki & Vikki, and Pac-Man Collection. 

I would say that when it comes to the games, the 7800 has some decent quality. It's even more impressive when you consider what was going on with Atari at the time.  It was a capable system that is only now seeing it's potential reached. I have a total of 110 games to review for my blog, and while it would seem that I've done 93 of them, I really haven't. I'll be looking at them all again for the blog, and I'll see if the stats change when I'm done.  I broke things down even further, but I'll stop here because not everybody is a stat nut like me. Any thoughts? Thanks guy!