Acid Drop

Also known as: N/A

Developer: Satu

Acid Drop is one of the many puzzle games that appeared after the massive success of Tetris. The big difference between Acid Drop and all of those other puzzle games is that Acid Drop was on the Atari 2600...in 1992…about 10 years after the popularity of that system had hit its peak and fizzled out. It also appears to be a European-exclusive release. Acid Drop is pretty much like Columns in that you've got vertical blocks of multiple colors and your goal is to match up three of each color. In terms of Atari 2600 games, Acid Drop is actually very well done, and is a solid puzzle game. If you compare it to other games from 1992 on other consoles, however, you may be a bit underwhelmed. Still, if you’re a fan of the simplicity of Atari 2600 games, Acid Drop may be worth tracking down. Just be aware, though, this was a European-exclusive title, so unless you live on that continent, you may find some issues tracking a copy down to call your own.

Review added: 09/23/2019

Adventure

Also known as: N/A

Developer: Atari

Adventure is basically the game that started the "adventure" genre. It may seem pretty basic by today’s standards, but it was amazing for its time. It also laid the groundwork for games like the Legend of Zelda to come along later and improve upon. If you play Adventure today, you’ll be able to see the similarities between this game and the 2D Zelda titles pretty easily….except instead of controlling a elf-looking lad in green, and working your way towards battling ol’ pig-faced Ganon, you’re controlling a dot that fights dragons that look like seahorses. Yes, the visuals looks cheesy and plain today, and for folks used to realistic-looking visuals, the idea of controlling a dot is laughable, but Adventure is a game that shows that, aged graphics aside, when a game is designed well, it can still be fun to play forty years after it was released. I’ve got a suspicion that at the one-hundred year mark, Adventure will still be an enjoyable game to pop in and kill a few minutes with. It’s good, quick, simple fun.

Review added: 07/21/2019

Air-Sea Battle

Also known as: Target Fun (Sears), Batalha Aero-Naval (South America)

Developer: Atari

Air-Sea Battle is a multi-player game where your goal is to shoot down more stuff than your friend. Planes, helicopters, fish, and smiley faces move past and act as your targets. I get planes, helicopters, and fish…it has “Air-Sea” in the title, after all…but I’m not quite sure where the developers saw vicious, murderous smiley faces in the oceans of clouds when looking for potential targets to shoot at. Then again, I’m not sure if the D.A.R.E. program was around back in 1977…if it wasn’t, that may explain it. Frantically trying to shoot down more targets than your friend is midly fun at first, but it wears thin after a while. Not even friendly trash talk exchanged between friends could really help the enjoyment last more than a game or two for me. 

Review added: 07/07/2019

Airlock

Also known as: N/A

Developer: Data Age

Airlock is a very quick, very simple game…but it’s also not bad for its time. Essentially, you control a person trying to escape a sinking ship by moving up each level and closing the airlocks as you go in order to avoid drowning. The strange part is that when you win, four of the five ship segments are likely filled with water, yet somehow your sea vessel stays afloat with you celebrating on top. If you die on the first level, only one segment is filled with water, but everything sinks. The ship’s buoyancy is dependent on the vital signs of the character that you control, it seems. Video game logic, everyone. Anyway, Airlock is an okay game to kill five minutes or so…but once you get the hang of what to do and how you time your jumps, you can literally hold your breath for the entire playthrough, which aside from the setting of this game being on a flooding ship, may actually be how this game got its name.

Review added: 02/15/2020

Alien

Also known as: N/A

Developer: 20th Century Fox

When you think of the Alien movies, you’d likely imagine that a video game adaption back in the early 80’s would have been something similar to Space Invaders, or perhaps another type of game that would involve shooting. 20th Century Fox Video Games had a different idea. What game could they emulate that would best fit the tone of the film? They decided on Pac-Man. Yup. Though it was a head-scratcher of a decision, it was still a very well-made game. This is not an exact Pac-Man clone, mind you. There are two things that set it apart. One, the pellets that allow you to “eat” the aliens only appear on the screen one at a time. You must use one for it to spawn in another location to use again. The second thing that sets it apart is that whenever you beat a Pac-Man stage, the next screen emulates a different game – Frogger. On that part of the game, you must attempt to make your way through an Alien parade to reach the goal at the end…unfortunately, unlike the Pac-Man aspect, the Frogger part of the game isn’t nearly as fun as the game it emulates. That gripe aside, Alien is very well done, for the most part. If the Frogger areas had been made better (or eliminated completely) then I’d give this game a higher score…but as it is, it’s still a worthwhile game to play. If you’re expecting a shooter, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re simply hoping for a fun game with the Alien franchise tacked on, then you may enjoy the time you spend playing this.

Review added: 10/19/2019

Asteroids

Also known as: Asteroides (South America)

Developer: Atari

Asteroids in the arcade was fun, but it also presented a pretty steep learning curve. A lot of people simply tried to stay in one position and rotate their ship 360 degrees to shoot, mainly because the "space gravity" that you had to battle when moving your ship added even more difficulty to the mix. That's where the home version of Asteroids excels. Like many Atari 2600 games, Asteroids includes several variations of the popular arcade game, and some of them are so easy that you'll probably max out the score and have it reset to zero. These designs, created for "young children," according to the manual, also help novices get used to how the game works and "trains" them, to a degree, for playing the more difficult styles of the game. I would not be surprised that if someone gradually played into the more difficult variations of Asteroids at home on this cartridge, that they would have been able to enter the arcade and do pretty well there. Aside from the basic Asteroids game, though, the Atari 2600 version, like Space Invaders before it, actually adds even more styles of gameplay, so even if you were a veteran of the arcade game and could play it with your eyes closed, the Atari 2600 had some new challenges for you to try. The three big additions were the options of Hyperspace, Shields, and Flip. Hyperspace gives you the ability to "warp" your ship to a random location on the screen. It's a double-edged sword as a feature, as it can help you escape situations where your ship is about to be crushed, but since you'll end up in a random location on screen, there's also a chance that you'll wind up in a place where you'll instantly see your ship destroyed…so, it's a neat concept that doesn't necessarily help the player much if overused. Shields is another game that offers some help, but with a catch. In this variation, you can use a protective shield to prevent your ship from being destroyed. However, if you use the shield for longer than two seconds, your ship will explode. Last is Flip, which is the only one of the three new options that doesn't really have a negative to it. In Flip, you're able to flip your ship 180 degrees at the press of a button, so if you see an asteroid barreling towards you from behind, you don't need to fly out of the way or rotate your ship into position to fire. Just flip your ship and you'll be able to fire right away. In addition to the new game modes, Asteroids on the 2600 provides plenty of color. The original arcade game was vector-based graphically…so it was black, with while lines outlining the ship and asteroids. It worked, but it's also kind of boring to look at. The Atari 2600, replaced the vector graphics with big, colorful sprites. It's a rare instance from that time period where some folks believe that the home console version of Asteroids actually looked better than what they got in the arcades. Anyway, like their port of Space Invaders before it, this port of Asteroids was very good. Providing new colorful graphics, exclusive, new game modes, and various difficulties to please both novices and veterans, this is a must-have game if you own an Atari 2600.

Review added: 04/17/2026

Atlantis

Also known as: N/A

Developer: Imagic

Atlantis really is a fantastic Atari 2600 shooter. Not only is it very nice-looking for the time, with its colorful graphics, but the gameplay is also quite solid. Essentially, the goal in Atlantis is to switch between three cannons to fire from as enemy ships soar above the city. The enemy ships will try to attack the city, so it’s your goal to stop them. However, the enemy does fight back, so aside from attacking the city, they also attack your cannons. Each cannon fires in a different direction, allowing you to shoot diagonally left and right, and a center cannon shoots straight up. Changing up where you're firing from is the key to success here - simply firing from one cannon the whole time won't yield the best results. Once the enemy starts wiping out your cannons, that's when everything gets a bit frantic and hectic...but it's also pretty fun, trying your best to go down with the ship, so to speak, but taking out as much of the enemy with you as you go. Atlantis may fall, but it won't fall without most of the enemy falling with it!! Alright, that's a little too dramatic, but you get what I mean. Atlantis is widely regarded as one of the better shooters on the Atari 2600, and it may be Imagic's best game that they’ve ever developed. If you get the chance to play it, I highly recommend doing so. It was one of the best games available in the early days of video games and in the later days of the Atari 2600.

Review added: 09/12/2022