Top 10 games on a given console: Atari 2600 (aka Get Off My Lawn) edition

Combat
River Raid
Missile Command
Defender
Pitfall
Space Invaders
Adventure

I don’t think I ever won Raiders of The Lost Ark. I got pretty good at getting to the well of souls but no further. Never did figure it out. Didn’t stop me from trying about a billion times. These days I can’t even remember how to get to the black market, let alone how to not get shot there.

I could sit and play Laser Blast pretty much forever once I got it the right zone. Zap, zap, dodge, zap, wait; repeat. One of the few I qualified score wise for a badge I never bothered to send in for. I think I was years late anyway.

Solar Fox was, I think, a pretty poor arcade port but that didn’t stop me from playing it nonstop for several months. Somehow in the porting the players ship lost the ability to fire back. Turned it into a pure dodging and collecting game.

Barnstorming was the other game I did well enough at to earn a badge I never bothered to apply for. I pretty much stopped playing this one once I hit those target scores though. Maybe it was just proto-cheevo hunting and not that good of a game.

Other notables for me are River Raid, Pitfall, Chopper Command (did Activision make any clunkers in that era?), HERO, and Adventure.

Don’t know if I can sort them in priority order at all… Enumerated anyway, but don’t read much into that aspect.

  1. Pitfall I was never very good, but I played this for hours and hours and hours making maps and plotting courses.
  2. Enduro Always loved racing games. I would hit a Zen state on this one and just go. Loved it.
  3. Yar’s Revenge Another I sucked at bug loved. My cousin owned this own before I did and we’d play it at his place. Great memories.
  4. Ms. Pac Man Amazing rendition. Didn’t try too hard to be exactly like the arcade, which the 2600 couldn’t handle, but instead captured the feel of the game and created its own thing.
  5. Asteroids One of the few I actually did get good at. I could play this pretty much indefinitely until sleep deprivation made me get clumsy. My sister and I had to institute a “you only get one life” policy when taking turns and it still wasn’t enough.
  6. Adventure A friend down the street had this one. One of the first that made me feel like there was a sense of progression rather than just “and now the next level is even harder!”
  7. Warlords One of the few (to me) really great multiplayer games for the 2600. Another that my cousin and I played to death.
  8. Raiders of the Lost Ark Like Adventure, this captured the feeling of there being a story behind the game as well as the game itself being fun.
  9. Missile Command Captured the feel of the arcade version pretty well. Less frenetic due to hardware limitations, but still really really fun.
  10. Frogger My sister’s favourite by far, and not far behind for me. Many many hours were spent doing our best to have froggies not go splat.

Interestingly, never owned Adventure myself. However, prior to having an Atari 2600 of my own I do remember loving nothing more than going with my parents to K-Mart so I could play it on one of the demo models they had running in the back electronics area. And dear god was it annoying when it wasn’t turned on/working/whatever.

All I can remember is I got an Atari when the commercial jingle said it was only $50. “Fifty bucks!? Well isn’t that nice!” or something. I had saved up all summer picking rocks, bailing hay, castrating pigs, and in general working on a farm several hours a day… and at the end of the summer I got $50 and so did my brother. At the time it was a vast fortune, so we went half and half on the system and got a few games each, I grabbed Joust and Asteroids, and I know he had Ms. Pac-Man and something else. It was a glorious time, but we already had an NES at my Dad’s house, so this was just an extra fun thing for at Mom’s. Must have been the latest/last one that ever came out, I imagine.

Yeah, that sounds like the sleek 1988-esque reissue. I remember those ads too.

So I think I must have had an Atari 2600 after all, according to this alarmingly nostolgia inducing ad.

And for the record @Timex Joust was on this system, so I officially re-instate my original list! :)

I saw my old haircut in there.

The so-called 2600jr. was a fairly elegant design. Can’t beat the original’s wood paneling, of course!

Weird, that looks exactly like a 5200.

Oh, Tron Deadly Disks was pretty cool too, and there was that neat Tron joystick too.

Yep, Nifty joystick that had a cool blue see-thru(ish) color and the cable would wind into the base for storage.
Hmm… I can’t remember if it had suction cups or not.

River Raid
Moon Patrol
Haunted House
Combat

Oh damn! Enduro! I forgot that one. I must’ve played 50 hours on that one. You could really truly zone out on that one.

Did any of you guys buy the Starpath Supercharger?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/26/Starpath_Supercharger_and_games.jpg

It was a cassette expansion peripheral for the 2600. The games were mostly imitations of other games, but I considered it money well spent at the time. My favorite was probably “Phaser Patrol”, which was a Star Raiders knock-off.

Yep, Mindmaster and Dragonstomper are in my top 10 list earlier in the thread.

I also had a modem for the 2600 that let you download games and play them for around 10 cents per time played.

On phone so can’t type a book, but I’d put H.E.R.O. in my top ten.

Pitfall 2
Outlaw
Video Pinball
Pitfall

(I loved Kaboom and Frogger, but I played those on the 5200.)

I didn’t find it horrible. But it was pretty weird. The grapple section was so finicky (and failure there meant game over, IIRC). It had disparate parts that at times corresponded to the movie but other parts were just out of nowhere (e.g. the Spider). It had a merchant (or 2?) and you could buy stuff and keep an inventory. That was so fascinating at the time. I seem to recall there were pitfalls that could ruin a playthrough. Beyond dying, I mean. Maybe doing the amulet wrong before the grapple section, or something.

Figuring out how to navigate the challenges (quite literally in some cases, e.g. that grapple section) was frustrating at times but once I mastered the game I returned to it quite a bit.

There was a weird secret room! Can’t recall how it worked though.

Had forgotten about Moon Patrol!