Welcome to Modojo, 
RetroMo: Atari Lynx
Written by Señor Cha Cha on Friday, May 26, 2006
Ok, so the Lynx was HUGE, had horrid battery life, and an astonishingly bad button layout, but it had Klax. KLAX!
...Continued From Page 2
The top of the Lynx contains old friends, some of the same ones on other portable systems. From left to right there's the brightness knob, AC power plug, the COMLYNX jack (allows you to connect up to 16 other Lynxs for multi-play), the headphone jack, and finally, the volume control. And as a side note to COMLYNX shenanigans, while up to 17 people can play at the same time, I've never seen a game that supports this number.
Ah yes! The Lynx's bottom. Yup, this is where the batteries go. A piece of plastic slides out, and...you put the batteries in there. That is all.
Here's a great side of the Lynx! The back! The read end! It's badunkadunk, and believe me when I tell you that the Lynx has quite the J-Lo booty. On its left and right are rubber hand grips (I bet J Lo doesn't have those) and dead center is the cartridge slot.
Let's take a good look at these carts. The Lynx's games are about as thin as the Turbo Express' HuCards. There's also a lip near the top that allows you to easily yank games out of the device. So they're just like Game Boy games except without the plastic shell.
A system is made by its games, so it pains me (not really) to say that this was another one of the Lynx's Achilles Heels. As you're about to see, there are definitely good games for this system such as Blue Lightning and Ms Pac Man (not pictured), but there weren't enough of them. Atari and its fellow publishers couldn't crank out enough hits to compete with the Game Boy. But here are some of its best games as well as a few that, while they've been slammed by other writers, are still close to my heart.
posted May 28, 2006