^{April 29, 2000} The Atari Lynx, Atari's entry into the portable game system market. Like most of their other attempts, this one was doomed to fail - in fact, everything since the VCS, or 2600 could be classified a failure...but anyway, the Atari Lynx was a powerful little system. It was said to be 16 bit (an equivalent to the TG-16, SNES or Genesis, or so they said) and could do much the same things as any of the other 16 bitters of the time; scaling, rotation, and all the other graphic buzzwords back in the day. And it could do them really well, and the Lynx really was a powerful piece of machinery.

But like the Jaguar that would appear in the future, the Lynx suffered from a lack of 3rd party support, meaning that Atari was pretty much left to develop games for its little Lynx. And many of the games were strictly average, and there weren't many that really caught the public eye. Sure, there were a few that game it some publicity (Blue Lightening, Battle Wheels), but things weren't really consistent, and the Lynx itself was part of the problem.

The thing was huge. Yeah, it was a beast - it was pretty wide horizontally, with a wide screen and many buttons on either 'wing' of the system. Later, a more compact and cheaper version of the Lynx would be released, called the Lynx II, in hopes of refreshing interest in the portable. The Lynx II had a better screen and smaller design, and was overall a big improvement, but it was still pretty expensive, a problem that I figure was one of the Lynx's biggest to begin with.

I always wanted one, even though they were big, expensive, and games were hard to come by - and I only first played one about a year ago when I discovered the wonderful world of emulation. I still want one, since it's always better to play the games on the actual system, but emulation gave me a taste of what the Lynx was all about. And there were some really good games for it. And there were some really BAD games for it, too...read the reviews and find out what I mean.