jesus christ activision sure knows how to make tense games for the 2600. On average, this game is like 6-7 seconds long, which sounds pathetic on paper but dear lord getting that time down is an absolute struggle.

So here's why this game is kinda nuts: there's a tachometer at the bottom of your screen. If it goes past 3/4ths of your screen at any time, you blow up and die instantaneously. Pushing the button on the controller is your gas and your gas moves the meter up. Pushing down the left direction on the joystick puts you in a clutch state where the tachometer is so sensitive to gas that pretty much holding both the button and left at the same time at any point is a death sentence. Releasing left after pressing it down brings you up a gear, where you go faster with a slower tachometer. Basically you need to do as close to frame-perfect button presses and joystick inputs/releases as you feasibly can, and if you do it right, you get a good time, and if you do it even slightly wrong you either die in a horrific car explosion or get a shit time that brings great dishonor to your drag racing career. The manual's challenge of getting under 6 seconds to join the World Class Dragster Club is no simple task either. Considering the frame-perfect theoretical perfect time is 5.57, there's a shockingly small margin of error to join that prestigious, 40-years-defunct club (and if you say you've gotten a 5.51 before, you are a liar!). It took me dozens upon dozens of attempts to be able to just barely squeeze out a 5.94 that I swear to god felt like luck as I did the same thing I usually did for a good run, I just must have happened to have pressed the buttons at a more optimal time. Though I guess since the game is only 6 seconds long on a good run those dozens of attempts was still only like 20-30 minutes of grind. I felt like I spent more time waiting for the starting countdown to finish (or prematurely exploding by failing to properly feather the gas during the countdown as a way to get a good start) than actually racing, which is kinda eh but it is what it is.

It's certainly a deep and thought-out game that has a high skill ceiling to work up towards for sure. With how much frame-perfection is emphasized here, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a game to sew the seeds of speedrunning or just general high-level gamer tech to the still-blossoming Atari gamer crowd. But it does mean that this game is definitely geared towards that certain type of player, so if you aren't into personal time attack grinds there's pretty much less game time for you in this game than the time it took you to read this whole ramble in the first place. Fascinating!

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.