The Closeout Warrior

In the heyday of the Atari 2600, there were a lot of games that I only played a time or two. These were the games that were passed around my neighborhood to everyone that had systems because we couldn’t afford too many games, but we could each afford a few different ones each.

One of the games that made its way through my doors was Chopper Command. It, like a lot of games for the system, is pretty straightforward. You have a convoy of trucks at the bottom of the screen that you must protect from enemy fire. You control a helicopter (a choppa!) that is quite maneuverable and has a gun powerful enough to vaporize the enemy aircraft with one shot. Once you eliminate all of the enemies you go to the next stage where the game gets slightly harder.

It’s kind of fun, but it’s a whole lot like Defender. If you’ve played that game, then you know what to expect here… more or less. If you haven’t played Defender, you might want to give this a try over that one, it’s slightly less complicated.

Everyone knows about Donkey Kong, take Mario to the top of a construction site and rescue the kidnapped damsel in distress from the giant monkey. It’s ubiquity is pretty impressive.

Its ubiquity also means that it was crammed into any system in homes, with as many concessions taken as needed to ensure that every man, woman, and child on the Earth could play this thing whenever they wanted to.

The Atari 2600 was barely capable of displaying anything that resembled… well anything. Imagine what it would look like if you tried to sculpt a monkey out of Play-Doh, though you’d never seen a monkey before and you were actually deathly allergic to said putty.

Levels? Sure, some of them are here. You get the iconic ’tilted girders’ level, you get the ‘kill the monkey by destroying the building’ level (though no actual monkey death takes place). And that’s about it. No pie factory here, folks.

This is just about the shoddiest home version of Donkey Kong that you’re going to be able to find, it’s also going to be one of the easiest. Pass it by and look for something better.

River Raid is an interesting game in a few ways. It was programmed by Carol Shaw, who is considered to be one of the first female game designers (or programmer, or both depending on where you get your information). It also featured massively long, non-repeating terrain, which was a pretty tough feat to accomplish on the marginal hardware of the Atari 2600.

But what was it? It was a shooting game (a.k.a. a Shoot ‘em Up, or Sh’mup) where you had to travel down a fictitious river, shooting down enemy ships, helicopters, planes, and bridges. You also had to keep an eye on your fuel gauge. Once it runs out, you = dead. So you have to make sure you hit the fuel tanks spaced throughout the river (which you can also shoot for points, natch). Your plane is pretty flimsy, it will crash if it takes a direct hit from anything but a fuel tank. Fuel tanks will give you gas. But, this is mitigated by the fact that the enemy vehicles and structures also become completely demolished with one shot.

Your goal, of course, is to get a high enough score to take a picture and send off for the super-sweet patch (the kind you sew on). I never managed to do that, though I did manage to destroy a bridge by hitting it with a plane. That counts for something, eh?

The first Pitfall game was a very good game for the time, so it was only natural that a follow-up game be developed. Pitfall II takes the formula of the original Pitfall! game (Pitfall Harry is running around a jungle collecting things) and expands it with several new features that make this game quite memorable:

It had a soundtrack that looped endlessly and was very catchy, resulting in it getting stuck in my head for days on end. There were still long horizontal stretches of screens, but the screens had the ability to scroll vertically, a huge accomplishment for the time. Pitfall Harry learned to swim. You had unlimited lives (although dieing cost you some points). And it had a definite ending, you won once you rescue your pet mountain lion, your niece, and a ponderously large diamond.

I, unfortunately, was never able to rescue any of those things, although I did manage to get on the same screen as the mountain lion once, that’s got to account for something, right?

Right?

Pitfall Harry is on a mission: He has three lives and twenty minutes to collect 32 treasures strewn throughout a mysterious jungle. Will you help him achieve this goal?

Will you?

Pitfall! has 255 screens laid out in a gigantic straight line, each one unique, 32 of which have treasure. He can run and scroll the screen to the right or the left in search for the treasures. The sheer scope of the game was quite a feat for the time. Each screen has some combination of a vine (for swinging, and yelling like Tarzan), logs (rolling or stationary) that impair your movement and steal points somehow, a stationary lake that may or may not have crocodiles (you can jump on their heads when their mouths are closed, otherwise they eat you), a lake that will open and close you can drown in, a tar pit that’s either stationary or opens and closes that you can drown in, a ladder (or holes) that lead to an underground area that may or may not have a Deadly Scorpion in it. Whew! Like I said, the game was crazy-detailed for a game on the Atari 2600.

Sadly, although I played the game for months on end, I was never able to get all 32 treasures. It somehow never occurred to me to make or use a map. I was, however able to run to the right for the entire twenty minutes without losing a life. That has to account for something, right?

Nearly everyone who’s ever heard of video games has heard of Pac-Man. There have been sequels, ports, and spinoffs for just about every video game system ever created, and this ubiquity virtually guaranteed that no matter what video game system you owned that you’d never be very far away from Hot Dot Munching Action ™. Unfortunately it also guaranteed that not all of the ports would be, shall we say, good.

The Atari 2600 was especially suited to mediocre ports of good games, and Pac-Man was no exception. The game was superficially identical to its arcade namesake: it had one unchanging level, it had ghost-shaped monsters, the main character is a roundish disc that must eat everything in the maze to progress.

There weren’t too many problems with this game. The maze layout was completely different than the arcade version, there were only three ghost-shaped monsters instead of four (and they were all the same color), the dots looked more like wafers, the sounds were completely wrong, there were no fruit-bonuses (but there were some bonus square-shaped things), the escape tunnels were on the top and bottom of the screen instead of the left and right sides, there were no acts between levels, and the game was ridiculously easy.

But otherwise it was completely identical.