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

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!

Yeah! I was a little shocked I was the only one that had mentioned it :) I still get that tune stuck in my head sometimes!

I could never afford a 2600 (or Atari VCS as it was known then) and there was no way my parents would spend that kind of money on me, but I played it at various friends’ houses – I was a huge arcade kid, and just never found any of the games on Atari’s first console any good at all – they were just so badly inferior to arcade games.

The only one I’d pick on this list would be Adventure, since it offered something that wasn’t available at the arcade, and gave me hope that we’d one day get something that offered what I liked about AD&D at the time.

I did finally manage to get a console when Atari 5200 came out, and it was clearly the best little machine of the pre-Nintendo era. Although it didn’t ever succeed in offering an RPG or similar adventure, it did have the first space sims (well, at least Star Raiders, one of my favorite games ever), arcade adaptions that at least started to resemble the original games, and some other great original games (Dreadnought Factor, Miner 2049er). But it was a commercial bust and had those defective soft button controllers that all busted.

I’ve never been tempted to get one of those Atari 2600 nostalgia machines because the games were terrible, but I was always saddened that the 5200 never got one.

There were a lot of good 2600 games, if you accept the basic simplicity and the crude graphics. Warlords is basically perfect, for example. The vast majority are unplayable now but the cream is still good fun.

This was my first utter videogame disappointment/call back to reality. As a little fan of the arcade game, witnessing the Atari version was crushing, to me, the same way what the Pac-Man fans must have felt.

It is funny, because overall, I had the reverse approach to arcade games - which might have been because the machines here were so badly maintained: the controls in the arcade were often horrible, while even with that cheap microswitch-less Atari stick, a lot of the Atari good games felt very snappy. Visually and aurally though, there was just no comparison to be made.