FUCK YEAH, KABOOM

im biased as fuck, this is easily my favorite game on the atari 2600. Using the paddle controller to catch bombs from the mad bomber is hella addicting, specifically due to just how unrelentingly difficult the game is. You gotta be mfin FAST to get anywhere past level 5, and scoring high is actually a reasonable challenge. Unlike Pitfall and Oink, the other two activision games I hit the manuals target challenge score for so far, getting 3000 points in this game to enter the Bucket Brigade takes a sizeable amount of practice and skill to pull off, where you get that one hot run going and it all just comes together, like shit man it's just satisfying as fuck to play this. It just gets me in that flowstate man where every game over has me immediately reaching for that reset button to play some more. God I love kaboom dude if you have an atari and a paddle controller for it this shit is an on-sight play

Another "banger with another person, pretty dire on your own"-like. The 2600 probably has a lot of these... There's a big grid of squares and one of them has a flag that two players compete to find. You can actually use the joystick to move around as a cursor to select which square you want to search (take THAT, a game of concentration! I knew you could make a cursor in 1978!), and if it's the flag, you win! If it's not, it's either a directional hint pointing you where it could be, a number hint telling you how far away it is, or a bomb that sends you back to the starting point (owned). It's more classic dumb simple fun that the Atari is good at, and there's definitely enough randomness involved for there to be fun shenanigans like guessing completely right on the first try or being misled to hit a bomb that you were SURE was the flag. The game gives the options for each player to either take turns guessing or have both players go at the same time for a chaotic free-for-all. You can also toggle having the flag MOVE every turn, with options to have it loop around the edges of the screen or bounce off of them to make things harder to find. For the solitary gamers out there though, all you get is a simple time attack where you have 75 seconds to collect as many flags as you can, with no real goal to aim for other than whatever your previous high score was. At least it's something? Definitely worth busting out when it's Atari night for sure.

For the game that comes with the Atari 2600, it's a great way to showcase the real appeal of the system both then and now ngl. The best moments from this console come from the simplicity of the games combined with the social aspect of playing the games with a friend. Combat absolutely fills that role quite well, as the games within are simple and easy to understand (shoot each other) and the selectable game modes and maps provide enough variety to keep things interesting for a long time. While the standard tank mode is fun enough, there's a surprising amount of fun to be had in the tank-pong mode, where bullets ricochet off of walls allowing for insane trick shots, or the sneakiness that comes from Invisible tank, where the only time a tank is visible is when it's firing a shot, allowing for extra strategy as you try to estimate where you and your opponent are (and yet neither player is always perfectly on-the-mark thanks to the stiff controls both players have to deal with). The plane modes are kinda lame tho. If you've never done it before, I'd highly suggest getting a homie, throwin on some music in the background, and just playing Atari games with them while talkin about whatever. That shits always a good time. I'm honestly surprised that this is the pack-in game instead of a safer pick like Pong, but I guess they probably did that to differentiate themselves from the plenty of already-existing dedicated pong machines at the time. Can't say it's one of the best Atari games due to the fact that it's basically useless to the solitary gamers out there, but it's a damn good statement of intent for the 2600.

You know, by 1978 I'm sure they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they never really considered whether or not they should. It's your typical memory-based flip-the-cards-and-get-matches type beat, and while I can certainly dunk on this for entirely being something that's more suited for a mini-game in even an NES game, but this do be like literally year 1 atari stuff so I have plenty of slack to cut in the content regard.

That being said though even in the context of its release I think this game is beaten by an actual deck of cards in a lot of ways. For a console that ships with a controller with 4 directions and a button why the hell would you go with needing a proprietary number pad controller to dial in which cards you want to pick instead of like using the joystick as a cursor and the button to select? The single player mode is entirely player-driven when it comes to goals; the manual doesn't even have anything like "try for a score under 10 to be a real Atari Concentration Camper!" or whatever, you just match pictures, and when it's done it's over. There's also a mode that replaces one pair of pictures with 2 wild cards that can be matched with any other card, except for the fact that it doesn't clear both the card the wild card is matching with as well as the card that it's supposed to be matched with, which just leaves you with a dead game at the end as you have two spare cards that cannot match with each other. It makes the wild cards less of an assist feature as they actually just end up being random game-ruining landmines. Very cool.

I get that this game was released in such an early state of gaming that the mere aspect of interacting with your TV to play something normally designed for tabletop play gave this game enough value through novelty, but like there are 2600 launch titles like combat and pong that have way more intuitive and responsive gameplay and control, so even in its time there would be better options to play imo.

holy shit. I just beat Battletoads.

I've seen the web lambast this game endlessly as the game has been showered with the title of "hardest game of all time" from all sorts of people and places on the internet. For years I had just assumed that this would be a game that I would never even think to pass the infamous Turbo Tunnels, much less actually see the ending. It was only when I saw this game cleared on a two-part Game Center CX playthrough when the illusion of this game being impossibly difficult faded. In fact, it looked like a fun kind of challenge! I figured that if Arino could beat this game, so could I, and as such I put it on the "games-to-stream" backburner until the time had come. And boy, did the time come. Roughly 9 hours of grinding later, here we are.

I think the main reason why this game sticks out so much as being so nightmarishly difficult is mostly due to how outwardly hostile the games design tends to be. Memorizing the levels and becoming intimately familiar with them through repetition (and a little bit of trial and error) is the key to being able to progress. Each level honestly stands out from one another well enough to make climbing back to where you were before at every game over not TOO painful in the grand scheme of things. Each of the 12 levels usually has some kind of gimmick or new mechanic to grapple with, like the ropes in stage 2, the turbo tunnels in 3, ice in 4, surfing in 5, snakes in 6, etc etc. Honestly the game does a solid job introducing the mechanics to let you know how things work before cranking the heat up. Graphically this game is really solid on the NES with plenty of quirks and tricks used to give the game some pizazz. It's definitely more of an A-list Rare NES title that contrasts from the licensed shovelware they occasionally made (likely to fund the projects they actually wanted to make like this)

It is still quite a spicy game, so those that are averse to getting your shit kicked in will have a bad time. Honestly the difficulty felt most similar to like middle-echelon Mario Maker levels. Like, the kind of stuff made by someone who is clearly good at games but not like insane person kaizo shit nawsay? Considering the fact that Rare has mentioned their lead designers being good at games and that a lot of difficult NES games are usually products of the developers also being the playtesters, essentially tuning their games for themselves rather than their players and accidentally cranking it up a bit too much, that's likely why this game is how it is. I had to use every trick the US version of the game could allow to finish this; I used the warps to skip levels 2, 4, and 7 while also alternating both players every continue with down+A+B held to get the most possible lives and continues the game offers, and even then I made it out on my last continue. Against games like this though, you really gotta get every leg up on the game that you can ngl, a clear is a clear. The hardest part for sure was the third rat in Rat Race, if you can pass that point you have enough skills to make it through the rest imo. Clinger Winger or whatever tf it was called was a cakewalk ngl, I heard the horror stories about that level and was surprised when I cleared the speeder section on my first attempt. This game is certainly a hot one, but idk it's definitely not the hardest game ever made. I don't even think it's the hardest game I've played, I had way more struggles with getting through stuff like Ninja Gaiden Sigma and God Hand (to their detriment, mind you. Overly hard games suck imo) than with this. The game is still pretty masochist-core, don't get me wrong, but if it was really the hardest game ever, I wouldn't have been able to get here in the first place. A must-play for pain-seekers, but definitely take-it-or-leave-it for the normal folk out there.

naw man i can't think of any reason why you should play this, especially over the much superior Basketball that came out much earlier. Like, I respect the attempt to innovate by making it be 2v2s instead of 1v1s, the visuals look more like a basketball court instead of the surface of mars, and you can hear the crowd cheer every time you score, but the added complexity of the team aspect of the game really hurts more than it helps.

The court is like split into two horizontal rows that each team player resides in, and you control them at the same time. You can't have the lower player go in the upper half and the upper player can't go in the lower half, it's like theres an invisible barrier that separates your two players. If the ball lands in the middle of the court, is it in the upper or lower half? Who knows! There's also the added problem of the pass and shoot buttons being bound to the singular button on the joystick, so it's very easy to do one action when you were intending to do the other. Awesome! The CPU obviously has none of these problems, and will absolutely smoke you no matter what difficulty settings you might have the game set to. I would say this might be fun with another player as both people are bound to the same control handicaps, but you know what else is more fun either by yourself or with a friend? REGULAR BASKETBALL PLAY THAT INSTEAD THAT GAME OWNS!!! if this is what real sports are I only care about fake sports.

luckily it's very unlikely you could be in a situation where you could only be able to play this and not regular basketball given the fact that this game was never actually released and as such the only way to play it is through compilation titles, flashcarts, or emulation. As far as I can tell, every title that features this game has the superior regular basketball as an option as well with the one exception being... Atari 50?!?!? What's up with that??