Sam's video game collection essentials

Another Starpath game gifted to me by  Keith Messier . Dragonstomper is a rather obscure yet highly significant game, because it may have been the first RPG ever released for consoles! (Its actual release date is not known precisely) Many old RPGs are not much fun to go back to at all in modern times, so you’d expect this one to feel borderline unplayable today. But surprisingly, that’s not the case! Sure, it’s never going to sniff any “favorite RPG” list of mine, but playing this game for the first time as an adult in the 2010s, I found myself getting invested and having a good time. Unlike most RPGs, there’s not really any story to speak of here other than “big dragon bad, hero must kill dragon.” Starting a new game, you’re thrown right into the action. The game takes place in three phases. In the first, you’re basically going around fighting enemies in turn-based battles and checking out points of interest on the map looking for ways to increase your stats, earn money and find i...

  Here’s a game that is mainly on here because of its title. COMMUNIST MUTANTS FROM SPACE!! What a name! That’s as cheesy an ‘80s title as it gets! I was immediately tickled when I saw this among  Keith Messier ’s batch of Atari games that he gifted me. In addition, the game behind the name, luckily, is actually pretty good. It’s one of many games heavily inspired by Space Invaders and other shooters from its day. Unfortunately, there’s really nothing during the game itself that references Communism at all, really. You have to shoot down all the bad guys in the cluster at the top of the screen and dodge them as they swoop down to try and get you (like in Galaga), and you have to keep firing at a pretty good pace because the “Mother Creature” behind them will keep spitting out new minions during a given round until you manage to destroy her. There are a variety of very welcome options to tweak the gameplay and difficulty to your liking. Despite being a good game, I have to admi...

  Today’s essential is not a game, but rather, an accessory. This is the first of several expansion add-ons you’re going to see in this series. Basically, accessories like these have their own games made for them that are bought at retail, but the accessory itself is not a stand-alone console and requires a certain other console to function. So what is the Starpath Supercharger and how does it work? It’s a cartridge that plugs into an Atari 2600. It has a cord sticking out of it that plugs into a headphone jack of an audio cassette player. Games for the Supercharger come on cassette tapes! I’ll bet you never knew that tapes were ever used to store video games. You insert the game tape into a cassette player, and with the Supercharger plugged into the headphone jack, you press “play” on the player and the game’s data is then loaded. Once the initial loading is complete, you hit stop on the cassette player and proceed to start playing your game. So why do accessories like this exist?...

  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 i...

I don’t have a ton to say about this one, it’s pretty straightforward and fun! It’s basically Pong for four players, with each person guarding a different corner of the screen. Again, four-player in the Atari days was really rare and awesome! Always a great choice when the friends be hangin’.  

  There’s a good chance you’ve heard of a super old game called Pong, which was made by Atari and released in 1972. Pong wasn’t the first ever video game, and it wasn’t even the first arcade game, but it was the industry’s first commercial success. And it’s not hard to see why. It’s a very simple game that’s super easy to describe. One player controls a thin rectangle on one side of the screen, the second player controls one on the other side, and they hit a little dot back and forth hoping to squeak it past the other player to score points. It was super simple, easy to understand and play immediately, social due to being two players, and it was addictive. By the time the Atari 2600 came out five years later, in 1977, Pong wasn’t so fresh and new anymore, and it was probably a bit too simple even to even be an Atari 2600 game ported directly. But Atari brilliantly took Pong and its concept and expanded it greatly as one of the launch titles for the 2600, resulting in Video Olympics...

  This is a first-person maze game where you’re trying to escape a series of labyrinths before the monsters get you. When you first pop it in it may not seem too interesting, but upon reading about how the game works and/or actually trying it out, you’ll see that it’s actually quite well done. As you keep getting through more and more mazes, the game will get harder, such as for example no longer allowing you to see everything on your map. You escape through a door in each level (after finding the key), but the doors you find eventually do different things such as transport you to a different part of a maze or send you back to the previous one (and yes, you can tell before going in). There are a few different types of enemies, too, and I love the way they use the primitive Atari sound effects to indicate when monsters are coming. You can play a set of pre-made mazes, or go with randomly-generated ones for a new experience every time, which is a sort of thing I really like in my gam...

The original Breakout was a very early popular arcade title, taking the concept of Pong and giving it a single-player twist, as the player hits the ball around to eliminate a series of blocks at the top of the screen rather than trying to get the ball past an identical opponent. It was a very influential and significant title. Breakout has had many imitators, but Super Breakout here is the official sequel. This is a great example of why I like to do projects like this one where I go through and thoroughly sample games in my collection; I remember Super Breakout feeling a little boring and dated. But giving it a spin recently, I realized that my memory was very wrong! There are fun modes of play that keep things challenging and fun, such as modes where you have multiple balls in play or when the wall of bricks is slowly descending upon you to keep the pressure on. The Atari paddle controller is perfect for controlling a game like this. My only real complaint is that there is no simultan...

  Here’s a big one you maybe saw coming. Space Invaders was easily the biggest video game hit of the 1970s. It’s almost impossible to overstate both the popularity and impact of this game, it’s one of the absolutely top most historically-significant video games ever, if not #1. Space Invaders hit arcades in 1978 and represented many significant “firsts” for video games, such as being the first to give the player multiple lives and the first to have background music. It was also the first big game to come from Japan, which foreshadowed the country’s dominance of the industry that emerged in the mid-’80s. One of the sprites of the invading aliens remains an iconic video game symbol to this day. This Atari version that came out in 1980 was an enormous boon to the success of the console and was its most popular. There are so many other games for the Atari and in arcades that very clearly imitate Space Invaders, and of course others that received more subtle influence. I do have to conf...

In this shooter, you play as a submarine. There are three different things you need to do in this game, those being 1) Shooting down enemies, 2) Rescuing divers, and 3) Going up to the surface to refill your oxygen. Games like this work really well on the Atari, easy to pick up and play and yet with different elements to keep you challenged and engaged. Just a really fun, solid game.

  River Raid is considered one of the best Atari games, and for good reason. The Atari had many “shoot ‘em ups” (thanks largely due to a game coming up soon), but not many had a scrolling screen like River Raid does. In this game, you control a fighter plane as the screen level scrolls automatically, and you must dodge obstacles and shoot enemies trying for the highest score you can. What complicates matters is the fact that you have a limited amount of fuel, and you have to make sure you refuel regularly at fuel towers or else you’ll crash and burn. You can’t just shoot recklessly, or else you could accidentally destroy a crucial fuel tower!! But you can also strategically destroy them if you don’t need the fuel and want extra points. All this makes for gameplay that is fairly simple but challenge and engaging, and the result is one of the best games of the era that’s still plenty of fun all these years later.

This is one of the games that came with the Atari bundle my mom got me in 2006. Otherwise, I’m not sure I ever would have heard of it. It’s pretty unique in the Atari library and a bit more complex than your average Atari game! You play as Short-Order Sam, and for some reason this restaurant has machines that shoot out ingredients at you. You have to swat away ingredients you don’t need and properly place the ones that you do onto burgers to fulfill the orders shown at the bottom of the screen. Things can get really hectic and tough. There would be other games made years later with similar concepts, but as far as I know there aren’t any from this time quite like this. A cool game featuring a guy with the right name!  

Pitfall had a sequel on Atari?! That was pretty much my reaction when Keith Messier gifted me this game. I don’t think I had even heard of it, despite the original being so famous. Well, unfortunately this game came out after the video game console market started crashing, so that’s probably why it’s not so well known. But it’s a shame, because this is a mighty impressive Atari game. A big glaring obvious thing that sets it apart from its peers is that: it has full-fledged background music! That sounds like an odd thing to compliment since nearly every game in my lifetime has that, but on the Atari that was almost unheard of. Sure, some games had music, but the tunes were always very short. This one has a type of soundtrack you’d expect to see in a game from the following generation. Gameplay-wise it resembles the first game a lot, only there’s a lot more verticality to the level design, and some added gameplay elements such as new enemies.

  If you’re at all acquainted with the Atari 2600, odds are you know what Pitfall! is already. It’s known for being one of the first ever “platformer” games, predating Mario. The game involves navigating a series of screens looking for a number of treasures to score points within a 20-minute time limit. In the present day, first impressions of Pitfall! may make you think the game is totally outdated and obsolete. I guess that’s a little bit true, you can’t replicate the feeling of seeing a game like this for the first time in 1982. But it actually holds up better than you’d expect. There is a surprisingly large amount to explore for an Atari game, and trying to map the game out is very complex due to different portions of the screen leading to different areas. The game also completely avoids sticking the player with “cheap deaths.” For those who don’t know what that term means, a cheap death in video games is basically when an enemy/obstacle/etc. gets you in a way that you absolute...

  E.T. is a game that’s listed here almost purely for its infamous historical significance. E.T., of course, was a new hit movie from Steven Spielberg during the Atari’s lifespan, and wanting to take advantage of its popularity, one of Atari’s developers was given a mandate to produce an E.T. video game in time for the holiday season, which was…much less time than a normal video game development cycle. Uh oh. The game was highly anticipated, and Atari produced many, many cartridges in anticipation. While the game did sell pretty well to begin with, it didn’t meet people’s expectations, and demand dried up prematurely, not to mention a lot of disappointed people returned the game. So Atari took a big hit both financially and to their reputation, and this was one of the major factors to the big video game crash of 1983. For years there was an urban legend that Atari buried a bunch of their excess stock in a New Mexico landfill, until a project in 2014 sought to investigate and found ...

  Ms. Pac-Man in arcades in many ways, amazingly, overshadowed the original, and that’s something I’m probably going to talk about when I get to a different version of the game. For now, I want to focus on this particular Atari version, and what a remarkably better job they did than when they ported the original game. As I said last time, the Atari hardware was pretty weak and becoming more and more outdated. There was no way that Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man were going to have anything close to an accurate arcade transition onto Atari. But this version of Ms. Pac-Man truly exposes how badly they dropped the ball when porting the original Pac-Man, which was bad enough to the point where it helped cause Atari’s downfall. For Ms. Pac-Man, an effort was actually made to represent Ms. Pac-Man well. The fruit is actually fruit, the colors of the fruit and ghosts are actually accurate, the ghosts still have to flicker a little but nowhere nearly as bad as the first game, and the little tune th...

  Pac-Man, as you probably know, is one of the most iconic of the early video game greats. So, naturally, people highly anticipated a port on the Atari 2600 to bring the game home. While the Atari version did sell several million copies, this significantly helped contribute to Atari’s downfall. Bringing Pac-Man to Atari 2600 was already going to be an uphill climb, as the low-powered console was becoming more and more outdated and there was no way they were going to 100% faithfully recreate the arcade game as the system lacked the capability to do so. And it turns out that this version didn’t even live up to its already-limited potential (which will be demonstrated by the game I’ll be talking about tomorrow). Some of the charm of the arcade game is gone, for example, the collectible fruit is replaced by a generic rectangle. Perhaps the worst part is that the ghosts constantly flicker in a way that is visually very unappealing (notice how you can only see one ghost in the image here...

  Another well-known classic by Atari, first released in arcades and well-ported to the 2600. If you’re my age or older there’s a high chance you’ve seen this game, but in case you haven’t, it involves an endless barrage of missiles coming down at you (remember, this was made late in the Cold War so it was on peoples’ minds as a possibility!) and you control an icon that you freely move around the screen to aim your counter-shots to try and detonate the missiles before they touch down and cause destruction. You have several different bases that you can fire out of, so there's a good incentive to not let any of them get hit since you will be more effective if you can shoot from them all. You also have to learn to plan your shots, since they come out very slow. You have to learn to shoot where the missiles are going to be shortly, not where they currently are. An absolute must-own for any Atari fan.

Here’s another game that makes great use of the paddle controller for precise left-to-right movement. In Kaboom!, you control the bucket(s) at the bottom of the screen and your goal is to catch the bombs that the naughty dude at the top of the screen drops. They start out slow and get super fast before you know it. Simple, but fun and addictive. My only real complaint is that there aren’t any options for variations on difficulty or gameplay as you normally see in Atari games.

Here’s a fun and unique Atari game. You control a cannon with a human cannonball waiting to be shot, and your goal is to shoot him into a pool, taking into consideration your angle, the strength of the wind and obstacles in the way. A variety of modes make for a good range of difficulties. This makes for a great two-player game, as you and a friend take turns and see who can land the most shots in the given amount of attempts!