I’m a child of the arcades. I cut my teeth on Mr. Do, Centipede, Spy Hunter, Gauntlet, Mortal Kombat… you know the drill. There was nothing like heading to Aladdin’s Castle, saddling up to a cabinet, dropping in a token an taking a firm grip of the controls. Tangible, honest to god joysticks and buttons. I love games nowadays, and have embraced touchscreen gaming fully. But still, it’s hard to fondly remember the way it used to be. Enter the Atari Arcade controller powered by Duo.

You may remember Duo as the add on peripheral called Yoomi that is also used in conjunction with the iPad. Discovery Bay Games went back to the idea of physical additions to the iPad to push the device in a new direction once again, this time turning your iPad into a little mini arcade machine.

The piece is really pretty simple. There’s a slot and a dock connector nestled in the top and in front of that you have your joystick and 4 buttons. The iPad gets slotted into position and there are little tabs to hold it in securely. It can handle either the iPad or the iPad2. It rests at a nice tilted angle to give you a good view of the action. There are no-slip pads on the bottom of it to keep it steady on a table or wherever and they work very well.

You’ll use the touch screen controls for everything but the actual game so you’ll navigate to the Atari games app, choose the game to play, set the options, etc all using the regular old touch screen. Once in-game though, everything happens on the fantastic feeling buttons and joystick. The buttons pop back up and offer a nice resistance, likewise the joystick snaps back to center as well. It’s all very tightly made.

All this goodness though comes with a bit of a downside, in that as of right now there’s only one app that the Duo works with, the Atari Greatest Hits Collection. It’s a free app that contains Pong, with 99 more than can be purchased in-app. So expect to drop a few dollars to get the games that you want to play. I’d definitely argue that buying the device should include a code or something to give you all the games (they cost a total of 15 bucks for all of them). My hope is that in the future the device may support more (or rather more apps support the device) but as of right now this won’t work with other versions of Pacman for instance. Only games in the Atari Greatest Hits collection.

A sizable chunk of the good Atari 2600 and a few choice arcade games are here in one form or another, from Asteroids to (my favorite) Yar’s Revenge. There’s also a bunch of weird ones like Atari Video Cube or Basic Math included. Not going to sugarcoat it, some of the games available here were garbage in 1980 and time hasn’t been kind to them. They’re bundled up in weird configurations that sadly will probably leave a lot of people feeling jilted. Some still control better than others, but even games that used trackballs (like Centipede or Missile Command) or something like the spinner control on Tempest aren’t bad here. I was surprised by that cause often that’s really not the case. It’s not ideal, but it beats the shit out touchscreen controls.

My only complaint (besides the app purchasing set-up) is how “click-y” the joystick sounds. There’s an audible sound when it gets moved around, and is just louder than I wish it was. It’s not terrible by any stretch, just with it wasn’t there. Of course the joystick does snap back to center very well so maybe it’s just necessary to the functionality. I’d rather have it noisy and responsive than the other way around.

Also, and this really isn’t a downside, I’d have loved to see the device also work as a power station for the iPad. Put a USB in jack on the back and let the iPad charge when just sitting in the dock. Now it’s a fun controller and a totally funky charger as well!

The best thing you can say about the Atari Duo Arcade is that it takes an entirely unplayable game and makes it a great deal of fun. Trying to play those classic games via touchscreen was/is an unmitigated disaster. With the Atari Arcade controller, not only are those game playable, they’re (mostly) downright enjoyable.

The Atari Arcade controller definitely pokes the nostalgia portion of your brain, but doesn’t just rely on that to provide a satisfying experience. Hope it gets supported by more apps down the line.