Atari 2600 Recommendations


Prometheus

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The Atari 2600 was quite a long-lived console - it's from before my time, and yet it was still going quite strong (at least in the UK) during my early childhood. I never had one myself, but I knew a couple of people with them, and later on a relative of mine had what I later learned was a piece of clone hardware, known as the Systema TV Boy II, which is where I (unknowingly) spent the most time with the system's games, until more recently when I started buying them myself.

Anyway, I figured that I'd get a recommendations thread going, since we have an emulator for it and all that. :p

Cosmic Ark - Shooting and Rescuing - Believed to be the first sequel to a home video game, Cosmic Ark is the follow-up to Imagic's Atlantis. The survivors of Atlantis (who could be seen escaping when you lost at the original game) have travelled to the Alpha Ro solar system, with the intent of saving as many creatures as possible from a fiery fate, because the sun there is about to burn out. You get to travel between planets, braving meteor storms along the way (these are defended against simply by pushing the controller in the direction that the meteor you want to hit is coming from - the Ark will then shoot that way; It's slightly unusual, but you get used to it quickly), and, once through those, you have to rescue two animals from the surface of each planet you visit, using a neat little shuttleship with a tractor-beam. You have to be quick, though, because those meteors don't stay gone for long!

Freeway - Crossing the Road - A good game for trying to beat personal bests, in Freeway you have to try to get as many chickens across a busy road during a set period of time as you can. Flipping the Atari 2600's difficulty switches changes how much traffic is on-screen, and how the traffic moves (in the manual, each of these patterns are named after busy US freeways, at different times of day and night). How many chickens can you get across the road?

Keystone Kapers - Policing - Play as a police officer who has to chase down and recapture an escaped robber who's running loose inside a shopping mall. You have to retrieve items, and catch the burglar before he gets to the roof. This is actually more challenging than it first appears, especially once harmful obstacles start appearing as the game progresses, and it strongly has that "Just one more go!" factor.

Pitfall! - Treasure-hunting - Play as Pitfall Harry - gaming's legendary equivalent to Indiana Jones - as he searches for treasure in a dense and dangerous jungle. There are 256 different screens, each connected to the other, and you have twenty real-world minutes in which to try to find every piece of treasure. You can tackle the game from whatever direction you choose, which was fairly unique at the time. Travelling underground will skip a few screens at a time, so you can use this to your advantage in order to traverse through the jungle more quickly in search of your goal.

Pitfall II: Lost Caverns - Treasure-hunting and Rescuing - Pitfall Harry returns, this time with his niece Rhonda, and pet Quickclaw (a cowardly mountain lion). He needs to find the valuable Raj Diamond, and rescue Rhonda and Quickclaw from the places they're stranded in, all whilst picking up any treasure he can find along the way. This game goes far beyond the original Pitfall!, and could even be viewed as something of a predecessor to games such as Metroid. The lost caverns from the title are far vaster than the jungle from the original game, and Harry can now even take a swim in an underground river that lies at the bottom of the caverns. It also has a soundtrack which changes depending on certain in-game events, which was way ahead of its time.
 
I would also recommend downloading and listening to episode 16 of the Retro Gaming Roundup podcast - http://www.retrogamingroundup.com/shownotes/2010/roundup016_2010.02.htm
They discuss their personal Top Ten games for the 2600 which could be of use for anyone new to the world of the 2600.

I've just recently bought an original 6-switch 1978 Atari 2600 to play games on the original hardware although I'll certainly still be playing via emulation on the Pandora when mine arrives.

I've also just ordered the Harmony cartridge which will enable me to easily play virtually every 2600 game in existence via simply dumping my Rom Sets onto an SD card and playing directly on the original machine. I can't wait for it to arrive. It looks like an amazing piece of kit. http://harmony.atariage.com/

Some other great games to try would be:

Chopper Command
Frogger
H.E.R.O
Jungle Hunt
River Raid
Berzerk

There's just so many great games for the system.
 
Pitfall! debuted on the 2600, and was, if memory serves, the best-selling game on the system. The best-selling first-party game was Yar's Revenge, if I remember right - good suggestion, love that game.
 
My emulated favs:

Asteroids (I had to put this first :rolleyes: )
Basketball
Beamrider
Berzerk
Bowling (4k version)
Boxing
California Games
Centipede
Centipede 2k (PD)
Chopper Command
Circus
Combat
Dig Dug
Donkey Kong
Freeway
Galaga (river raid clone)
Galaxian
Galaxian_new
Grand Prix (16k version)
Gravitar
Gyruss
Hero
Ice Hockey
Jawbreaker
Joust
Jungle Hunt
Kaboom
Mario Bros
Midnight Magic
Millipede
Miner 2049er (vol 1&2)
Miniature Golf
Missile Command
Moon Patrol
Mr Do
Ms Pac-Man
Off The Wall
Pac-2600 (PD)
Pengo
Pitfall 1
Pitfall 2 (10k version)
Pole Position
Q-Bert
River Raid
Skateboardin
Sky Diver
Space Invaders (hack)
Spitfire Attack
Spy Hunter
Stargate
Starpath - Frogger (Official version)
Super Baseball
Super Breakout
Super Cobra
Super Football
Tempest26
Tennis
Tetris 2600
Thrust
Vanguard
Venture
Video Pinball
Wizard of Wor
Xevious
Yars Revenge
Zaxxon

Some of the games play well, and it just shows how the old VCS holds up after all these years.
 
Asteroid said:
Asteroids (I had to put this first :rolleyes: )
You'll have to pardon me, but I actually half-expected this to be the only one you'd list. :lol:

Some of the games play well, and it just shows how the old VCS holds up after all these years.
I can back up this point further: Almost every game for this system is completely new to me, and a hell of a lot of them have clearly held up very well indeed. :)
 
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PAL version, by any chance? (If memory serves, wasn't that one PAL-only until it appeared on one of the Systema TV Boy variations?)

If so, the port of Stella that skeezix did doesn't have PAL support, and for some reason a select few PAL games crash out in zx-81's port as well (one of the affected games is Solar Fox - I have the PAL cartridge of that, but I have to use the NTSC dump of the game in order to play it on my Pandora).
 
A little off-topic, but there are not many Atari2600-threads around.

In Pitfall 2 (maybe in all roms?) there is only partial sound-output. I am only getting the rhythm-track, but not the two melody-tracks as music. Someone else experiencing this? Is this an issue of the pandora-stella? I ran the PF2 rom in stella on my Gentoo-system and it worked fine.
 
It is truly amazing the level of complexity the games could reach considering the limited hardware and the fact the system only was designed for 2 bitmapped sprites, 2 One pixel missile sprites and one pixel ball with the right had side of the screen mirroring the left side. Basically a programmable PONG machine, yet look what they did with it. Just read an article of how Rob Fulop found a bug that when a certain value was placed in the wrong spot displayed a bug in the hardware that was the "Star Field" background in Cosmic Ark. When David Crane was showing off Pitfall he didn't even bother to visit Rob at the Imagic booth, so he used his accidental find to create Cosmic Ark for the sole purpose of driving David Crane insane wondering how he did it. When David came by the next year and tried to play it cool it made Rob feel so happy. I think those days drove the game designers to really do something special. Now they have much more capable machines and produce beautiful graphics, but the creative gameplay element just isn't the same.
 
Yeah, my mind is boggled by how anyone made the Atari 2600 do anything. That machine was as primitive as all get out. On the other hand, it technically had a larger color palette than NES and you'd often see more unique colors on the screen too. So you'd have some pretty colorful games, but with the colors only changing by scanline.

Some of my favorites for the platform are Seaquest and Super Breakout. Also want to give a strong mention to Solaris for being a very impressive and fairly fun game, although it came out long after the system was dead.
 
Demon Attack!

I am suprised no one mentioned that one. It was pretty cool. It was purposefully made for the system which to me seems better than the weak arcade conversions (why not just play those in MAME?).

Yeh it was pretty cool that the 2600 had a pallette of 256 colors, much more than later systems like ColecoVision, C64 etc. The use of rasters made some mundane graphics look much better.
 
If he isn't joking, it's perfectly understandable - it's very similar to many modern releases. :p (To that end, it's not my cup of tea personally, but it isn't as dire a game as the internet mythology would suggest.)
 
Prometheus said:
If he isn't joking, it's perfectly understandable - it's very similar to many modern releases. :p (To that end, it's not my cup of tea personally, but it isn't as dire a game as the internet mythology would suggest.)

For me it was much like the Pacman (not quite the arcade at home) conversion (it plays its' own game). Understandably the old 6507 (CPU), 6532 (RIOT), and TIA combo had limitations, and the result commendable. But it could have been money better spent (looking back with 20/20 vision).

@ Blue Protoman:
Man you got balls.
 
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By the way, there is a homebrew port of Pac-Man for the 2600 that is exponentially better than the official version.
 
I dunno. Can't check due to blocks on my school laptop. (GP32X is not blocked. Probably because of the name.)
 
E.T. was one of the cartridges my parents got. Unlike modern day kids, most of us back then had small libraries of games for our one system. While E.T. has gone down in history as a bad game, if it's THE new game you got and knew this was it for a long while, you played it. Once you master not falling into every hole, the game play is not really that bad. It was actually quite sophisticated due to it's complexity and when I finally managed to get the mother-ship to return I actually felt a great sense of accomplishment. Sometimes even bad games can be good ones, and fond to the memory. I still play it in emulation from time to time and hope to get a better joystick and another cartridge and play it on my real Atari again someday (nothing like the real thing after all)

In my mind and experience, Pac-man was a much bigger let down than E.T.
 
@MikeNZ - Thanks for linking that episode of RetroGaming Roundup! I really enjoyed listening to their discussion on this topic. Based on their recommendation I checked out the 2600 version of Tapper and was amazed at how much fun it was.

Solaris might be the most advanced game on the 2600. It was a late release and is very good. Pitfall 2 stands out as another game that just amazed you that it was on the VCS, however most of us were playing games on various other computers by the time those released on the old big sixer. As a result, I think a lot of people have fond memories of older games that might not stand up anymore. Superman and Empire Strikes Back were games I loved back then.

I also played arcade games like PacMan, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, and Centipede for the first time on the 2600 and I still like playing some of those today. The additional game modes for Space Invaders make it worth playing on the 2600. Asteroids has some good extra modes as well, but they don't add as much to the gameplay IMO. As for the other arcade ports, there are some good ones, but I usually play the others on MAME if I'm using a handheld emulator.

The game that probably got me into gaming was simply Soccer for the VCS. It was lame, but as a 7 year old I sat there and figured out how to work the switches and pick the different single player game modes. From that point forward, the games became MY experience instead of my older brother's or anyone else that was setting it up for me.


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I will say that for me Kaboom is one of those games that I just immediately quit playing because its so repetitive and hard that after a few minutes, I just don't care anymore.
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There is an online community still creating games for the 2600. Check out this link for the rom and info about Halo 2600 released this year at CGE.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/166916-halo-for-the-2600-released-at-cge-download-the-game-here

The story in post #6 about the creation of the game is quite interesting.
 
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