"A huge disappointment"

The Aquarius was released by Mattel Electronics in 1984. It is still an ongoing debate over whether to classify the Aquarius as a video games system or a computer, seeing as how, it had limited gaming capabilities, yet also had limited computing abilities.

The Aquarius system itself is pretty compact compared to other computers of its time, like the Commodore 64 and the TI-99/4A. However, because of its compact size, the keyboard buttons were also very compact. The buttons were small and made of rubber, which made typing pretty darn hard. It takes a lot more force to get a button to register on the Aquarius than other computers of its era. The Aquarius's space bar was also awkwardly located directly under the left shift button. For any experience typist, this is a big nuisance and makes typing very tedious. One good thing about the Aquarius is programming in BASIC. There is a function key on the keyboard and when holding it in and pressing another button on the keyboard, a command will be entered without you having to type it all in. This was a nice feature for programmers.

The Aquarius also has a cartridge port for games, a printer port, and a cassette port for saving programs. The Aquarius comes with built in Microsoft BASIC and a whopping 4k of ram, however, only 1.7k of that is available to the user. To my knowledge, every Aquarius system came packaged with a Mini-Expander, which plugged into the cartridge port where games are played from. This device, along with running games, has a port for extra RAM, and two controller ports. The controllers are very similar to those of an Intellivision, except with fewer buttons and no side-fire buttons.

There are two known versions of the Aquarius. The original Aquarius is most common, and then released only in Australia and England is the Aquarius 2. In terms of games, there were only ten released, and none of them were really that great. The best among them however, are definitely Burgertime and Tron. Each game was packaged with two overlays for each controller, and two that went over each side of the keyboard. Without these, you can literally kiss goodbye any chance of understanding the games.

Graphics
The Aquarius was really primitive in it's time in terms of graphics. Looking at a screenshot of the game, the graphics look about average for the time, perhaps a little bit below. However, animations on this system were just terrible. I feel like I am playing one of those Tiger Handheld games. The movement really isn't fluid at all and just looks strange.

Sound
The Aquarius didn't really have high sound quality either. There was barely any music in any of the games, and the sound effects were really lack luster. Just a few beeps and buzzes cover the Aquarius's sound library.

Controls
It's hard to generalize about the controls for most systems, but there are definitely some things that can be said to sum up most of the Aquarius's games in terms of controls. Keyboard controls were almost always too spread out and hard to memorize without looking down at your keyboard. Using the controller is a lot better, but even on there the buttons are awkwardly placed and hard to memorize.

Final Words
As much as I like classic gaming, the Aquarius is just not a good system. It is pretty much useless. Though programming on it is relatively easy, typing on it is pretty darn terrible and monotonous. The game library is lacking in quality games all around. The Aquarius doesn't have much graphical or sound power and all in all really isn't that fun to play with. However, for a collector, the Aquarius turns heads. Every time a friend is in my game room, the Aquarius is one of the first things they turn to and say “What the heck is that?” This system is definitely fun to have from a collector's standpoint, but for playing games, there are many other more quality systems.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 02/03/06