Apparently Atari was supposed to release a cartridge-based handheld console in '81, meant mainly to port arcade games on more consumer-oriented hardware. The Atari 50 Collection is very vague regarding the reason behind its cancellation, but assuming that everything went according to plan, could you imagine how different the videogame landscape would have looked like in the 90's if Atari beat Nintendo's Gameboy to the punch by nearly a decade, back when the company was still at its most reputable? From the SNES up until the Wii, Nintendo's home console market was getting diminishing returns one release after the other, and God only knows where they'd be by the mid 2000's if not thanks to their prolific handhelds. Apples and oranges of course, and nothing would indicate that Nintendo wouldn't still find success on this market with a different approach, but it's fun to speculate about a world in which Atari was the one kept afloat by its portables division. Would we be getting a Jaguar 2? The Atari PUMA??? What would the Lynx have looked like, now able to model itself after a fruitful predecessor? Speaking of the Lynx... The only things i know about it are that it was very expensive, it ate batteries like a motherfucker and it was as large as a surf board. Never heard anything about the games themselves. The cover for Warbirds looked nice, so why not start from there?
For a handheld game that came out in 1990, Warbirds is impressively good on a graphical level. The chonky pixels may seem offputting at first, but considering how small the Lynx screen is compared to the average monitor/LCD screen you'll be playing this in through Atari 50, the overall presentation is really nice, very colorfoul and stylized even within the tight hardware limitations. But the real standout is how smooth the 3D rendering is, not looking much worse than what you'd see on a Super Nintendo, an aspect that works exceedingly in favour of a flying simulator.
Warbirds has a surprisingly modern approach to its game design, almost feeling more like a sandbox rather than a competitive race to the high score. You're given plenty of freedom to customize your experience, going from ammo quantity, to physics, to health total, even the respawn points of each plane can be toggled, and no specific combination of these settings yields any kind of penalty of reward, it's all up to your personal preferences. Some neat quality of life features worth noting as well, like being able to switch cameras inside the plane and the height/rotation meter. I've also gotta mention the instruction manual, that does a good job at explaining most of the game's mechanics while acting as your drill instructor, with a few comic book style vignettes in between tutorials. I'm really happy in general that this collection preserves manuals and flyers, since most of the games here were meant to be played alongside them and i would have been completely lost without it for Warbird.
Unfortunately, this game is as interesting as it is flawed. While the 3D rendering is impressive for a handheld, it suffers from low frame rate and drawing distance, both things that make it harder to figure out if you're actually hitting your foes. This is yet another game in the collection that could have benefitted from an overclocking setting. A more precise method to gauge the health of both your opponent and yourself would have partially solved this issue, but nothing of the sort exists here. If you don't toggle the setting for unlimited ammos, you're supposed to land on a warehouse to reload each time you run out. That's fine, except even after reading the manual i don't have the faintest clue of what the correct way to land is, and trust me i've tried.
My biggest issue with Warbirds is that once you've tinkered enough with the settings you're not left with much to do. There's only 5 missions in total and they all feel samey, taking place in the same area and with the same red planes. While i can absolutely recognize and praise all the effort that went into squeezing every little bit of hardware out of the Lynx to make this game a thing, many corners had to be cut as a result, and the finished product is a flying simulator that is a neat novelty, but little more than that.
