The object of each game is simple, to shoot down as many targets as you can and achieve the highest score possible. In each of the games the first variant is the standard game, the second features guided missiles and the last one pits a single player against a computer opponent. There are six basic types of game available here and for each of these there are several different variations, giving a total of 27 individual play modes. One of the earliest titles from Atari, Air-Sea Battle is also an updated conversion of an even earlier Atari arcade game. Atari 2600 Asteroids is also very common, so there really is no excuse not to own it! 8/10 Air-Sea Battle Atari - 1981 This version has an incredible 66 different game variations to choose from including big ships, small ships, vanishing rocks, hyper speed and multi-player modes among others which only adds to the already great gameplay. Due to the limitations of the VCS the vector graphics have been swapped for big colourful, if a bit blocky, rasters, but you will still recognise it. Each time you shot a rock it would split into smaller one which would move much faster, after enough shots they vanish completely.
You also had a handy hyperspace button to get you out of trouble where your ship would disappear and then re-appear in a random place on the screen. You could thrust your spacecraft around the screen and if it went off one side it came back on the other, this technique became known as wrap-around. The original coin-op was one of the first games to feature vector graphics and involved you shooting big space rocks into oblivion. 9/10 Asteroids Atari - 1981ĭeveloped by the now legendary Ed Logg, Asteroids is officially the most popular arcade game ever produced by Atari. This is a great puzzle game for the system that is extremely addictive, but I do suggest you turn the volume down as the music is horrible. The fire button lets you switch the order of the colours. You drop the blocks in groups of three in vertical alignment and must match three or more in a vertical or horizontal line to make them vanish. Where in Tetris you have to drop shapes into the pit to make lines in Columns and Acid Drop you must drop coloured blocks into the pit and match them up with others to make them disappear. For those who have never played Columns it’s a pretty simple puzzle game that many people tend to compare (somewhat wrongly in my opinion) to the classic Tetris. In 1992, some 15 years after the original release of the 2600, the German part of Activision, Salu, released Acid Drop, a pretty much direct rip-off of the popular Sega arcade game Columns. Thanks to Atari’s revival of the machine for the budget market in the late 80’s, with the 2600 Jr., a number of new games were released for the system. Back in the early nineties the 2600 was finally on its last legs after the longest life of any video games console ever.