The best of the best for Atari 2600 (part 2)

I would imagine that most people who end up reading this weren't alive for the existence of the Atari 2600 but if you were it was quite the phenomenon. Since video games were so new as far as home consoles were concerned it seemed like literally everyone had one of these systems and everyone played them, even if they weren't really into them.

Looking back on these games given the movie-like experience that modern gaming can bring to everyone's living rooms these games look pretty silly, even though some of them are over 40 years old. At the time it was all we knew, and it was great fun. Here is my take on what the best games were for the first truly successful home gaming system.

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Combat

This is the one that began it all for most people as this was the game that came along with the system. There are 27 different games inside the cartridge and they were fun for various reasons. It was all about killing your opponent and you needed to people in order to play this one because there was no computer controlled AI.

The most fun games were the tank ones where physics played a part of your strategy because you would bounce your shots off the walls in the in order to hit your opponent. Eventually, experts like myself knew various methods of bouncing the shot is many different ways to be able to hit the enemy at almost anywhere on the board.

The visuals were blockey and the sound was extremely monotone just like everyone other game at the time but we loved it!

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Yars' Revenge

You are a giant wasp-like thing that needs to destroy whatever that is on the other side of the screen. You are perpetually pursued by a dot that will kill you if it hits you and the thing on the other side of the force field barrier turns into a flying blade every now and then that you must also dodge. The only way to destroy whatever that is on the other side is for you to chew away at the shield or shoot it (chewing is faster but more dangerous) and then fire your cannon into it to end the round. Then the next round comes, it get progressively more difficult. As far as I know the game did not have an ending but it would become impossible at a certain point where the little dot that pursues you endlessly gradually gets faster and at some point it is faster than you are.

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Dig Dug

Dig Dug, like a lot of Atari games, was actually a port of very popular arcade machines that were at first a bit disappointing because the graphical differences between arcade and Atari were immense and by immense I mean that home version sucked compared to the colorful and exciting arcade machine. But I suppose there is only so much you can do with 4 kilobytes of internal storage capacity.

Once you got past the fact that this game was nowhere near as good looking as the arcade it was a lot of fun and you didn't have put any quarters in it, and I suppose that is a plus.

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Pole Position

Of all the games on the 2600, I think this one is the top choice for games that were ahead of their time. Although it seems very simplistic today, the fact that they were able to created a pseudo-3D environment on a machine that has the computing power of an alarm clock is pretty spectacular.

Pole Position was simplistic in that since the controller only had one button that you only had brakes, acceleration was automatic and basically all you did was dodge opponents as the appears (this happened quickly since the hardware was incapable of showing very far into the distance.)

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So that'll do it for today. Looking back, the early 80's were a truly special time for video games and even though Atari would go on to make blunder after blunder before finally giving up in the early 90's there was a time when they WERE the video game industry and a rather untouchable one at that. When you consider this it is kind of easier to understand how they would self-destruct under their own arrogance.