The Atari7800 prosystem is a 8-bit game machine that has near perfect arcade translations of older arcade games like Ms. Pac Man, Galaga, Asteriods and Dig Dug, but also has lousy ports newer arcade titles like Ikari Warriors, Xenophone, and Double Dragon.  The Atari name was still poison after the Great Video Game Crash of 1984 that was caused by Atari's multi-million failures like Atari Pac Man and E.T. for the Atari 2600, which killed the entire Video Game industry. The Atari 7800 got destroyed by new comer Nintendo and their NES 8-bit game machine in the late eighties.

Unlike the NES though the Atari 7800games always seem to work on the first try mainly because it was an top loader system, as oppose to the box-like design found on the NES. I never had to clean my 7800games like I had to with my NES games because the circuit boards were always well protected in the Atari cartridge cases. If you get bored with the 7800games then you can always play the Atari 2600games on your Atari 7800 because it's one of the first machines ever to feature backwards play similar to the PS2. Now you can play over 1,000games on one machine! Sadly there is no game on the Atari 7800 quite as good some of the NES and Sega Master System games like Super Mario Bros. 3, The Guardian Legend, Final Fastasy, Y's The Vanished Omen, Phantasy Star, and many more mainly because the Atari 7800games are just too arcadey and they don't have any save features like battery back up or passwords either.

  The controllers for the 7800 are way too weird and its hard to get a good decent grip on the analog stick and I don't like how the action buttons are on opposite sides of the controller. There were also other NES-like controllers for the 7800 but they were only released in Europe, so we were out of luck.

Less than a hundred 7800games were made for this system, and it depresses me to even talk about it, but hey, at least it backward compatible with the Atari 2600games (but not the Atari 5200games unfortunately), that alone makes it worth buying.
Rating: 56/100 good.... just not NES good.

RARE SCALE: 6/10 a tougher find than the 2600 but not the 5200.