I received my Colecovision Flashback today, and have spent a couple of hours playing games on it so far.
I'm reasonably impressed with it. It has some flaws (I'd give it 3.5 out of 5 stars) - but it is a lot of fun. I used to own a 'real' 80s Colecovision with a fair number of cartridges, so I can compare the two. The new Flashback controllers are fairly close to the originals in both look and feel - but not exact. The joystick itself has a clicky, snappy feel to it that I don't think the original had. The video output on my LCD flatscreen is decent enough, but the sound in some games is off, some games much more so than others.
The selection of 60 games includes some classics such as Zaxxon, Space Panic, Frenzy, Space Fury, Pepper II (my fave!), Venture, Cosmic Avenger, etc. Of course, Nintendo would not licence them Donkey Kong, but where are Ladybug or Mousetrap?
The quality of the emulation is fairly good: not as precise as the newer Windows emulators, but decent enough. Honestly, I have to say that playing most of these games really doesn't look or feel much different than on my original system. Even the plastic keyboard overlays look like the 1980s originals!
So... what's not to like? Well, frankly, the selection of games is seriously lacking! I understand that it's hard to get some of these licences without having deep pockets, but there is quite a lot of 'shovelware' included. I would say that perhaps 15 or 20 of the games are good, decent games, but some of the remaining 40 games.... yikes!
I think that because the Intellivision Flashback has 60 games included, AtGames felt they had to do the same with the Colecovision version - and ended up padding out the included library. A good twenty or more of the games are from lesser known 80s publishers such as Spectravideo, Eclipse, or Interphase. There's a reason these companies are largely unknown - most of their games were not that good! And there are many mediocre 'homebrew' games included too.
Honestly, I think they should have skipped some of the included games, and just stuck to 20 or 30 of the better games. Including the crummy games only weakens the overall product.
I really hope that in the future version, some more of the top tier games are included. I realize that there are licencing issues and that may not even be legally possible, but I have my fingers crossed.
Overall, I am really pleased with my purchase. However, if you can't decide between the Intellivision or the Coleco version, I'd have to point to the Intellivision one as the better machine.