Bert Whetstone

Absolutely not one of my favorite VCS games. It's kind of like a more structured Pac-Man. You drive a "car" which looks like a dried out flat frog through a set of concentric rectangular pathways collecting dots. Your enemy are other cars set on a head-on collision course with you. You can avoid collisions by sliding into another pathway at regularly spaced openings.

Back in the 70s I read about a computer maze game in Creative Computing, along with some screenshots, which really impressed me and I really wanted to try playing such a game. With the release of Maze Craze that dream was realized. These mazes are of the simple 90-degree angle variety. You view the entire maze from above. If you like mazes it will give you a randomly generated maze of this type every time. In some variations you must avoid maze runners. Not very impressive today, but it's still fun if you like mazes and retrogaming.

The original horror survival game. You must explore a creepy haunted mansion, initially armed only with some matches for light. You'll go up against bats, spiders, and the ghost of old man Graves. In your search for the three pieces of a missing urn you'll also find a key to unlock doors, and a scepter which can make you invisible to enemies - but the catch is you can only carry one thing at a time. Collect all pieces to the urn and exit the mansion to win! The graphics are classic Atari 2600 but this is an excellent game. Turn down the lights and turn up the sound, you can still get a scare out of this one!

What can you say about this milestone in videogame history? It's too bad it didn't have an AI for solo play, but from a historical perspective this is where home videogames began for many people. Combat has many variations including tanks and aircraft, it's fun to play against another player, but the most fun is found in the positional bugs in the tank playfields! Just navigate your tank into a tight corner position and move it around a little, you'll get transported to the other side of a barrier or to the other end of the entire playfield. You can perfect this and use it in actual gameplay against another player. Shots can also be teleported in this way. Combat is a definitive game for the Atari 2600 and is a must-play.

A successful attempt to bring the classic Spacewar computer game into the home. The playfields may be small and the graphics chonky, but this is a suitable version of spacewar which can include a central star in some game variations. There is no computer AI to this at all, so a second player is recommended - and it's a very fun game if you can find someone.

First off - if you like bleeps, bloops, and other 1970s spacey-sounding electronic noises, definitely check this game out. It might be worth it to you for just the sounds alone. This may be the first first-person perspective semi-3D space game you could play at home. There was also an arcade version of this named "Starship 1" which was a lot more intense but with the same basic gameplay. I'm not sure which was released first. On this cartridge there are two distinctive types of games. There are the first-person space shooter games, then there are the multidirectional lunar lander type of games. In the space-shooter games alien enemy spacecraft approach you from a distance and you must blast them with your space lasers before either crashing into them, or avoiding them entirely. They are not intelligent in any way and do not fire at you - they are shootable obstacles only. In the lunar lander type of games you must maneuver your ship to make contact with a moon. The moon can be controlled by a second player, if desired.

This is a pretty unique game and I can't think of another quite comparable to it. It's a type of maze game where you drive a car which cannot crash but can fire a missile at another player. Your car can travel at several incremental speeds, and you can steer it to travel to other sections of the maze. It's a bit like those Tron motorcycles, a very digital experience. Your missiles can also be programmed to steer a certain way, or they can sometimes be dropped like mines. It's possible to practice navigating the mazes solo, but you really need another human player to get the full experience out of this game. This can be a very fun game, as long as you're okay with the extremely basic graphics.

Turn out the lights to get into the mood for this minimalist first-person perspective driving game. Using just vertical bars Night Driver gives the impression of depth on a road at night. It's like a haiku, in a way. Go as fast as you can secure in the knowledge that the arcade version of this game isn't graphically any better.

Back in the day you had to really want this game because it came with the additional cost of specialized controllers! I'm not sure if those controllers were ever used in any other 2600 games. The graphics are blocky but this is a very fun game, especially if you have a friend to race against. It is possible to cheat in some of these game variations, adding a little spice to the competition!

This is an extremely blocky version of golf where you don't even have a club. It might be best to think of this game as a kind of pool table maze. The graphics may be as basic as possible, but this is still a very fun game which requires some thought. Try to find a hole-in-one on each course - it is possible on almost all of them.