Atari 2600 Games for Atari 2600 Haters

[louisg]

I keep seeing it mentioned that Atari 2600 games aren't really that good, they're merely good for their time. I'd dispute that, and I'd also dispute that a lot of the games that people are steered towards have held up well. Sure, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall and River Raid were all absolute breakthroughs in the late 70s/early 80s, but they likely won't keep a modern player glued to the TV.

So, here is a list of what I consider to be fast, hectic, and tightly designed Atari 2600 games that I think hold up today (or at least likely have more staying power than those games you're playing in your web browser). Feel free to add to it!

A side note: A lot of these games are better when NOT set to easy. This is probably the default in many emulators, or the default setting when the game is loaded. Check the manuals for each. If you weren't impressed with Atari games before, this could be one of the reasons.

Turmoil
This is a Tempest-like shooter by 20th Century Fox. It's unusually fast paced, and puts up a good fight. Any fan of twitchy classic shmups will probably like this one.

Fantastic Voyage
If someone recommends you River Raid, just play this instead. It's similar, but with much more variety and trickier corridors. You must keep a patient alive by shooting almost everything that moves.. almost.. dont' shoot the red blood cells! This is at least better than that terrible Microcosm game, right?

Millipede
A seriously amazing version of the arcade game. I often enjoy playing this version instead because of it's slightly relaxed pace. It's also the better version to play if you prefer joystick controls.

Fishing Derby
This game is amazingly addictive with two players. To be honest, the Sega fishing games which garnered so much attention in the early 00s do not have much more complexity than this, and IIRC they don't have a two player mode!

Space Invaders
A better-than-arcade port featuring 2 player cooperative play and many different modes. The limitations of the Atari actually help with the pacing as each level features fewer invaders.

Super Breakout / Warlords / Video Olympics Volleyball / Circus Atari
All of these are very entertaining paddle games. After all, there's nothing quite like a paddle game played with a real set of paddles. The feel alone is worth the price of admission.

Demons to Diamonds
An oft-overlooked game, D2D is a competitive game somewhat similar to Space Invaders, but much more twitchy due to its fast lasers and precision paddle control. The rules are tailored perfectly for multiplayer play, rewarding precision shooting and punishing sloppiness. There's also some good strategy to be had here. I think it wasn't very popular because it's just so odd.

H.E.R.O.
Another late game, this has you rescuing trapped miners from dark caves. It has several levels of increasing difficulty, good variety, and then it starts randomly generating new maps once you've solved what it comes with. Out of all the ports, the 2600 edition plays the smoothest.

Frostbite
This is a clever puzzler-- it's Q-Bert meets .. something else. You jump from iceberg to iceberg to build your igloo, catching fish and avoiding crabs and polar bears along the way. It's very original and begging for a remake.

Gravitar
An immensely playable port of the arcade game. I'd take this over Thrust any day (maybe that's just me)

Decathlon / Winter Games / (Summer Games?)
These are good competitive sports games. I've played the first two, and expect Summer Games to be on par with Winter Games. WG in particular was a very impressive port from much more capable 8 bit computers, and it retains most of the gameplay of its bigger brother.

Enduro
OK, maybe I just have a soft spot for this one. But you owe it to yourself to try it if you enjoy Pole Position style racing games. Also check out The Great American Road Race on C64 and Atari home computers-- it's similar but with more depth.

Battlezone
Another impressive port. This plays in full 3d and retains a lot of the strategy of the arcade one. Not only that, but the graphics in some ways an improvement-- they realized they'd have no chance recreating the vectors of the original, so they went for full-blown colorful bitmap glory. Once you get a grip on how to play, it's hard to put down.

Wizard of Wor
A good, albeit flickery, port of the 2 player arcade game. Yes, it's way better with two players. It's a tense maze shooter featuring fast monsters and line of sight. It's kind of a survival horror maze shooter!

ADDED: Pressure Cooker
This is a unique game where you work in a burger joint. You have to assemble burgers to order before they fall off the conveyor belt. In later levels, you have to piece together multiple burgers at the same time, choosing a burger to make that fits the time you have left. It's hard to believe this game isn't better known!

ADDED: Beamrider
This is somewhere between Tempest and Juno First. It's a very challenging game that's worth a look if you like either of those.

ADDED: Solaris
Probably one of the more amazing games on Atari from a technical point of view, this is a hybrid strategy-action game. You probably won't get a kick out of it unless you like primitive space shooters, but this one does have a lot of elements to keep you busy: Space missions, ground missions, defending your space station, strategically refueling. It's everything Star Raiders wanted to be.

[BulletMagnet]

Warlords

I'm not a 2600 expert by any stretch of the imagination, but this one I remember: if you can get a willing group of 4 or more eager nerds together for Warlords (not as graphically advanced, of course, but I prefer the mechanics here to the arcade version) you're in for a good time.

[antron]

Can anyone name my avatar?

[louisg]

Can anyone name my avatar?

See: Gravitar entry

[antron]

Can anyone name my avatar?

See: Gravitar entry

ahh...

have you played Thrust with the driving controller and pedals?

[drauch]

Pitfall 2! Soooo good.

[louisg]

have you played Thrust with the driving controller and pedals?

No, but I think I need to! I've mostly just played the C64 edition.

[moonblood]

Solaris is great, played it a lot back in the day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buhHMAcRSwU

[Casey120]

The lack of Demon Attack disturbs me

[antron]

have you played Thrust with the driving controller and pedals?

No, but I think I need to! I've mostly just played the C64 edition.

You need to come over again.

I can't believe I've never played H.E.R.O. I gave my 8k homebrew board to a friend, so I have no way to play this on the real console. It's $50 on ebay, but I can get a Harmony flashcart for that much. Do you have this?

[louisg]

have you played Thrust with the driving controller and pedals?

No, but I think I need to! I've mostly just played the C64 edition.

I can't believe I've never played H.E.R.O. I gave my 8k homebrew board to a friend, so I have no way to play this on the real console. It's $50 on ebay, but I can get a Harmony flashcart for that much. Do you have this?[/quote]

Yeah, I've got the cart (and Solaris and Beamrider if you haven't seen those-- I think those are also 8k).

You need to come over again.

Yeah, we really should hang out and play some classics. I work just over in Menlo Park, so it's pretty easy for me to get down there.

[Herr Schatten]

No Spider Fighter or Beamrider?

[Drum]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hvlQrME5g4

Spider-Man is real fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kedRj3l3g

As is Stampede.

http://youtu.be/DJ6uHOhf2AA

Dragonstomper is pretty boss too, and has the best name ever. Pretty sure it's the first console RPG too.

I played a shoot em up where you controlled a submarine, but I can't remember what it was called. When you fired your torpedos you could adjust their path by moving your sub up and down. If anybody knows the name of this game, I'd be much obliged.

[louisg]

Spider-Man is real fun.
As is Stampede.

Yeah, those aren't bad either. I do like Stampede, but there is a trick you can pull with the row management that makes the game way easier-- it seemed a lot more fun before I discovered that. Basically, you work on a row until you get the slow cows to fill it, and then you eventually wind up with a very manageable screen full of slow cows that you can pick off. This is a winning strategy, but it makes the game so much less frantic that it changes the entire experience for the worse. It's still a good original game though. Another original concept game I left off my list that I like a lot is Towering Inferno. It's a smart game design, but the execution isn't all that great and it can be a bit too random.

I played a shoot em up where you controlled a submarine, but I can't remember what it was called. When you fired your torpedos you could adjust their path by moving your sub up and down. If anybody knows the name of this game, I'd be much obliged.

The sub game you're thinking of is probably Seaquest. It's not bad, but the difficulty curve is much too gentle for experienced players IMO.

No Spider Fighter or Beamrider?

I haven't played Spider Fighter very much, but it looks great. I left Beamrider off mostly because it's missing elements from other versions-- I think Turmoil plays similarly and is better on the 2600 (I've tried to pick games that are either exclusive or are best on the Atari). Same for Demon Attack (vs. the awesome port of Space Invaders). And this isn't to say that they're bad versions at all-- they're still well worth playing!

[Sumez]

Thanks for the suggestions. My 2600 is collecting dust as we speak.

[Nate]

My all time favorite 2600 game *barely edging out Frostbite* is Solar Storm by Imagic; it's a "zap-em-up" played with the paddle controller; at first "go" it's absolutely ludicrous, but give it about an hour and you'll see what i mean.

[louisg]

My all time favorite 2600 game *barely edging out Frostbite* is Solar Storm by Imagic; it's a "zap-em-up" played with the paddle controller; at first "go" it's absolutely ludicrous, but give it about an hour and you'll see what i mean.

I'm glad you mentioned that one- I was trying to remember its name. Yeah, that's a good one. Other honorable mentions should be Armor Attack, a Combat-like game that's much more strategic and lets the players switch off between two different tanks, Maze Craze, and Keystone Kapers. And you know what looks really cool, though I haven't had a chance to play it yet, is Secret Quest.

[szycag]

Anything that plays fast like Spider Fighter and Demon Attack is good on this system. I don't know if we're getting into ports but Amidar is really good on here too.

[BryanM]

The criteria for a good 2600 game is kind of lulzy: it can be recognized as a video game.

Nonetheless, Enduro is really the only one that I would call good unconditionally. There are games that make me pause wonder if it might be just possible to have a third person free range driving game (like GTA or Test Drive Unlimited) on a platform. Enduro is that game for the 2600.

A quick guide on the varieties of Pac Man available on the platform:

Pac-Man: Made its programmer, Frye, a million billion dollars. We prefer to call it "the abomination". In case you were wondering, no, there is no technical reason the maze isn't blue on black. Picking one color over another costs nothing.

Pac26 aka Pac Man Arcade: A romhack of Ms. Pac Man. My only solid complaints are that I prefer the pellets to be white and the maze could be slightly more faithful to the arcade version. A plus is that Ms.Pac Man includes a carebear mode that lets you have fewer ghosts in the maze.

Pacman4k: A version of Pac Man written to fit onto a 4k cartridge, the ROM limits Frye got to work with. It's adorable. My only complaint is that there's a lot of flicker; to include the routines for cloning sprites vertically, that would have taken extra room I suppose.

Hack'Em: A rom hack of Pesco (a homebrew from 1999). It's my favorite version to actually play, as Pac Man glides through the tunnel like a greased weasel. A slow chunker Pac Man just isn't that much fun. But still includes a speed toggle that brings it down to normal. It also includes the most important feature of all: the intermissions.

Thinking about interesting, viable homebrew projects is what I find most fun about the platform:

A more Zelda than Zelda clone:
It could be pretty cool if you had a second button. Do they make controllers that, like, have two buttons? Perhaps by, like, using Player 2's fire button? Hell, you could have a six button controller if you used both ports. In this brave new world of the future, little surprises me..

Catherine 2600:
The vertical scrolling, box puzzles, and creepiness are almost reasonable for the platform.

A jRPG:
Actually created some mock up screens/designs for this:



The actual color palette of the VCS would be more desaturated than that ^

The biggest brick wall is the brutally limited RAM. ~26 bytes is less than you get on a TI-82. You could fit in a simple smash-and-heal battle system, but tracking buffs, debuffs, aka anything necessary to make combat interesting.... hoo boy.

... I guess it goes to show what a helpless nerd I am that I'd spend an hour sorting out byte allocation on a project I'll never start. "Hurm, four characters... I could fit four names into 2 bits, so I could support four preset names for each class in a lookup table using only one byte... that's both wonderfully advanced for the platform, while still being appropriately 2600 ghetto..."

^ These are the types of thoughts I have instead of knowing the touch of a woman.

[antron]

the 2600 has two player "sprites". each is 8 pixels wide and solid in color on a given horizontal line. you can change its color as the scanline is drawing it, but that is very impractical. This is because three pixels are drawn for every CPU cycle. Your timing must be right on, and you can only do it once. If you try to load another value and write it to the color register the scanline will already be past the sprite.

you can use the "ball" to add some color to your character, but then to use it elsewhere you will have to cause flicker.

none of your characters are achievable as drawn, for example, the knight's leg cannot extend down into the horse.

oh, and because all your characters are wider than 8 pixels, you will need to use both players to make them. that leaves the two "missiles" to make everything else. they are just dots, that can be stretched into lines. nice. by the way, my 2600 homebrew 7 years in the making does this.

basically the entire system was engineered to make pong.

[louisg]

the 2600 has two player "sprites". each is 8 pixels wide and solid in color on a given horizontal line. you can change its color as the scanline is drawing it, but that is very impractical. This is because three pixels are drawn for every CPU cycle. Your timing must be right on, and you can only do it once. If you try to load another value and write it to the color register the scanline will already be past the sprite.

you can use the "ball" to add some color to your character, but then to use it elsewhere you will have to cause flicker.

none of your characters are achievable as drawn, for example, the knight's leg cannot extend down into the horse.

oh, and because all your characters are wider than 8 pixels, you will need to use both players to make them. that leaves the two "missiles" to make everything else. they are just dots, that can be stretched into lines. nice. by the way, my 2600 homebrew 7 years in the making does this.

basically the entire system was engineered to make pong.

Yeah, although the mock-ups are nice, they'd be better suited to an Atari 800. Without derailing the topic into further technical discussion, I want to underscore what Antron said: The system was made to run versions of Atari's existing TV games (pong and variants, tank, breakout, stunt cycle, video pinball). Anything more is a clever hack, which actually makes the 2600 a very exciting system if you're interested in the technical aspects. It's even to the point that Air-Sea Battle, a very simple launch game, is made using a tricks that the hardware designers did not have in mind (and tedious programming techniques like cycle counting).

Here is what should make you curious: As mentioned before, it's got only two sprites. It can't scroll. The backgrounds can only be made out of huge blocks and have to be symmetrical. How then do we get games with multicolor sprites, scrolling, and asymmetrical and (comparatively) detailed backgrounds? A great read that answers this is Racing the Beam. It's a very approachable book full of great anecdotes, and no prior programming knowledge is needed to get a lot out of it.

The criteria for a good 2600 game is kind of lulzy: it can be recognized as a video game.

If that is true, then the same has to be said of late 70s/early 80s arcade machines: the Atari 2600 had many good ports of those that preserve the same gameplay (Ms. Pac, Missile Command, Frogger, Defender II, I think I mentioned Gravitar, even Gyruss isn't too shabby, Joust, Venture, Q-Bert, Solar Fox, Berzerk, and the list goes on). Of course, this depends on how you feel about that era of arcade gaming.

[BryanM]

...

basically the entire system was engineered to make pong.

Ye, I'm aware it's an overreach for playfield graphics.

A crappier, more blown up interface might be possible... which would in fact be NOT crappy in a 1v1 rpg like a Pokemon clone, which could be potentially fantastic. By 2600 standards.

It can't scroll.

Vertical scrolling ought to be enough for anyone.

good ports... Joust

I admit that there are playable to decent to pretty good ports on the system... but wouldn't put Joust in that bracket. Lancelot >>> VCS Joust.

Pooyan, Moon Patrol... oi.

[louisg]

Ye, I'm aware it's an overreach for playfield graphics.

A crappier, more blown up interface might be possible... which would in fact be NOT crappy in a 1v1 rpg like a Pokemon clone, which could be potentially fantastic. By 2600 standards.

Yeah, remember that much of the coloring in 2600 games is per-line, though if cleverly done, it looks decent

You might want to check out that Dragonstomper game that Drum mentioned. It looks very much like a NES-era RPG and uses the 6k RAM of the Supercharger. I was very surprised- I didn't know anything like that existed.

[Estebang]

Demon Attack.

First shmup with sophisticated AI and morphing/splitting enemies.

(EDIT: Nice to see you guys already mentioned it multiple times.)

[Obiwanshinobi]

Is the Demon Attack's AI sophisticated above that of Bosconian?

[Mortificator]

20% of Bosconians can't even locate Bosconia on a map.

When it comes to '70s arcade ports, the 2600 had some that turned out better than the originals, like Space Invaders, Canyon Bomber, Sky Diver, and Dodge 'Em / Head-On. I also liked Solaris better than the 800's Star Raiders (though the direct port of that game wasn't so hot).

[Sumez]

Demon Attack.

First shmup with sophisticated AI and morphing/splitting enemies.

This video is awesome
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDGa02tgDis
(how to beat video games - Demon Attack)

[Drum]

The criteria for a good 2600 game is kind of lulzy: it can be recognized as a video game.

Nonetheless, Enduro is really the only one that I would call good unconditionally. There are games that make me pause wonder if it might be just possible to have a third person free range driving game (like GTA or Test Drive Unlimited) on a platform. Enduro is that game for the 2600.

I would love a game like those sped-up driving videos you see on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVqP1eaVzMk

I think you are being a *little* hard on some of the Atari games. There are a paltry few that were original games that haven't really been ripped-off or built on since, thus making them pretty playable even today.

[BulletMagnet]

20% of Bosconians can't even locate Bosconia on a map.

Even more alarmingly, only about half of respondents correctly identified the following photo of the nation's founders:

[PC Engine Fan X!]

I enjoy playing Imagic's Moonsweeper (released for the 2600 platform in 1983) on my 7800 console. Sure, it's a clone of Sega's "Buck Rogers in the Planet Zoom" arcade game (circa 1982) but with some novel twists 'n' spins of it's own. The scaling effects of the moon's surface & towers, especially at the fastest speed, are impressive/breathtaking for it's time. It's shows off what the 2600 could pull off in the hands of a single game designer.

I recall with fond memories of poning up ten bucks in quarters to buy MS brand new back in '83. Best forty quarters ever spent that day.

Imagic was based out of Los Gatos, CA, when they were still in business but went belly-up during the Great Video Game Crash of '83-'84 fiasco.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~