Collection essentials #27: Yars’ Revenge (2600)

 

I just now realized I’ve always placed the apostrophe wrong in this game’s title! It’s revenge of the Yars, plural, so it has to go at the end!!

Anyways, Yars’ Revenge is one of the most popular Atari 2600 titles. Space shooters were the hot thing to make back then, and for this game they sorta made one but went in a creative direction. The player controls the “Yar” that starts out on the left side of the screen, and the objective is repeatedly destroy the thing on the right side, called a Qotile. The Yar must first make an opening in the Qotile’s shield which can be done by shooting, but the Yar’s shot won’t affect the Qotile itself. To actually finish the job, the Yar has to activate its cannon (the method to do so depending a bit on what difficulty you’re playing on) and then make sure it aims the cannon shot properly to make contact. That can be tricky because the cannon shot doesn’t shoot out of the Yar itself, it comes from the left side of the screen, so you have to line it up properly and consider the trajectory of the Quotile and it shield so that the cannon will get through.

There’s also this bullet thing floating around that can kill the Yar, and the Qotile will sometimes transform into a weapon and attack, so avoiding death is something the player has to keep thinking about. The Yar is safe from the floating bullet when it hides in the strip of rainbow static in the center-left of the screen. A cool thing that you don’t see in these types of games too often is that you can fly to the top of the screen and, rather than running into a wall, you will emerge on the bottom of the screen, which doesn’t make logical sense at all but makes for a neat gameplay experience when trying to dodge stuff.

Yars’ Revenge stands out as unique among Atari games and definitely deserves its place in my collection. The game originally came with a neat comic book that I unfortunately don’t have, maybe I ought to pick that up someday.

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