The best of the best on Atari 2600 (part 3)

I may wrap it up here, i may not. I started this list out thinking it would only be one list, but then as i went down the rabbit hole more and more I realized that there were actually a lot more great games for the Atari 2600 than I had previously remembered. One game would trigger the memory of another and on and on it went.

So here are some other entries that were in my opinion the best games on the Atari 2600.

Adventure

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Not only do I think this is a great Atari game I think it is the best one overall. While there were other text-driven RPG's this game was the first one I remember playing that was completely visual. There were multiple difficulty levels and the best thing about the game was that it was never the same twice. You couldn't possibly become familiar with where the various items necessary to complete the level were, because they always moved.

The famous dragons from this game managed to be scary even though we were dealing with very limited technology at the time. They would pursue you relentlessly and were not constrained by walls the way that you are.

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By the way I would totally wear that shirt just to easily identify the people that I could have a conversation with all without speaking at all. You do not know what that is if you have not played Adventure. Fantastic game

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Berzerk

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Like any arcade to console port at the time, Berzerk lacked a great deal of the appeal that the quarter guzzling machine at the arcade had. Most of this had to do with sound and especially the digitized "robot sounding" speech that of course the Atari wasn't even close to capable of reproducing. Other than that though, the game was pretty solid... It also never ended as you simply continued endlessly down hallways to new zones. You couldn't dally in the rooms and you needed to hurry, otherwise Evil Otto would appear in the room and he was invincible. He was also smiling while he killed you.

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Pete Rose Baseball

You have probably never heard of this one or ever seen it because almost no one had it or bought it. The reason why that is was because by the time it was released the Atari 2600 was extremely outdated and no one was really thinking about it anymore. People had already moved over to Nintendo by the time this game was released in 1988 (NES was launched in late 1986) and it doesn't make sense that this game was released on the Atari 2600 at all. It was later re-released on the Atari 7800 a year later - which is also a system that nobody owned. It is a real shame that this game didn't get released several years earlier because it really shows what good programmers could do with limited technology.

It is by far one of the best looking games on the Atari 2600, it's just a shame it arrived to the console about 4 or 5 years late.

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Phoenix

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What makes this game so special isn't necessarily the shooter style because there were already a bunch of games like that and they are normally referred to as Space Invader successor even though they were different companies. What makes Phoenix so great is that it is the first shooter that I am aware of that had a boss battle. Which was seriously cool and was quite difficult as well. Of course this game, like almost every other Atari game had no end, so it would just cycle over and over as the enemies became more and more difficult until eventually you ran out of lives. This is why we always see scores on Atari 2600 games because there was no other method of determining who the best was.

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Is should come as no surprise that you can easily emulate all of these games or play them online and I suggest you check them out. If not for an opportunity to reminisce (because you weren't alive) than to see the sort of crap we considered to be cutting-edge entertainment more than 30 years ago.