The “Launch 20” for the Atari 2600 contained 5 sports titles (6 if you consider Flag Capture a sport). 25% of the initial release catalog was dedicated to sports gaming. That’s not a surprising number here in 2004. We can go back to the launches of the X-Box and Game Cube and see that sports game development was a highly discussed topic both pre and post-launch. In 1990, the then recently released Sega Genesis advertised heavily on its wide variety of (at the time) incredibly realistic sport...

Kicking off my series on the Atari 2600 “Launch 20”, we lead with Air-Sea Battle. Now, in order to be objective when reviewing Atari 2600 titles, you have to become somewhat of a time traveler. That is to say that it’s not fair to compare Air-Sea Battle to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It’s not even fair to compare Air-Sea Battle to Freeway. (Interestingly, it would be fair to compare Freeway and GTA: SA to Air-Sea Battle). So, what you end up having to do is examine competitive products ...

Atari made up for their edu-tainment disaster ''Basic Math'' with the excellent ''Math Grand Prix.'' This title takes the premise of ''Basic Math'''s quiz structure and applies it to an auto race.

Delving down into the 2600 catalog, we chance upon ''Fast Eddie'', a sophomore effort from the somewhat impressive 20th Century Fox catalog. While Fox never had a ''Frogger'' or ''Donkey Kong'' blockbuster smash during their tenure as a producer of 2600 cartridges, they had notably few total clunkers. This is remarkable because Fox got into the game business to capitalize on the television and movie licenses they held. Licensed games are usually pretty bad, but Fox was fortunate enough to have s...

Long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I was in elementary school, consumer electronics were not as reasonably priced as they are now. For example, my father bought a 19'' console color TV (''console'' means the whole unit was designed to sit on the floor) for the princely sum of $699 in 1984. (In 2004 dollars, that's $1237.88).

Activision had a wildly successful launch catalog for the Atari 2600. It is surprising that a company with such a keen understanding of the marketplace would release a game like ''Bridge''. The bridge playing crowd and the video game playing crowd didn't intersect much back in 1981, so this game came to be as a conceit to the designer more than as an attempt to reach a market segment.

I've written a great deal on the subject of M-Network games. It was a minor secret that M-Network was really an arm of Mattel that existed to port Intellivision hits over to the Atari 2600. However, there was one M-Network title that was an original design for the Atart 2600. That title was Air Raiders, and it really shows what Larry Zwick and the Blue Sky Rangers were capable of programming, regardless of the medium in which they were working.

There is nothing spectacular or remarkable about Atari's un-released prototype "A-Team". Nothing I can say about it that would recommend it as a superior game. In no way does it stand out or distinguish itself from countless other titles that were in development over at Atari HQ at the time.

Every reviewer has a different set of standards he or she applies to a game when giving it a rating and writing a critical evaluation. Graphics, sound, play control, and replayability are some of the criteria they use in deciding how to evaluate a game. But, these are mere tactics in deciding how to answer the universal question, ''Is this game any fun?''

During the development of the “Launch 20” for the Atari 2600, it seemed any programmer at Atari could get a project greenlighted. This was both a good and a bad thing. Some programmers came up with some innovative games in this era, like Surround and Space War. Gary Palmer, however, took advantage of Atari's liberal project approval and came out with a ''game'' so bad, its horror would not be overshadowed until the E.T. debacle.

The general concept behind ''Base Attack'' from Home-Vision is a reversal of the ''Atlantis'' formula from Imagic. Instead of defending the cities from an aerial attack, you're attacking the cities from the air.

Today’s topic in the wide world of Atari 2600 reviewing is a true oddity. Salu’s 1992... yes 1992... release, Acid Drop. Apparently, the Atari 2600 still had a following in Europe in the early 90s, and Salu released several titles during this period. Acid Drop was a clone of the1990 Genesis release, Columns. How well did the classic puzzler transfer to the limited hardware of the Atari 2600? Well, to be sure, Acid Drop is a mixed bag. The gameplay itself ...

Steve Cartwright, of Activision brings us the focus of our discussion today, Barnstorming. This was Cartwright's freshman effort for Activision, and it turned out pretty well for him. Steve Cartwright went on to have an incredible career in video game programming, and this game was a brilliant start. Cartwright really knew how to coax maximum performance from the Atari 2600.

I'll admit, when I first powered up Bomb's Assault cartridge, I was prepared to hate it. After discovering that it has a quirky control system that required you to push the joystick up to shoot, I was prepared to really burn it in this review. When I saw that the enemies looked just like the ones in Imagic's Demon Attack, only drawn with a dull crayon, I was prepared to give it a 3 at best.

The creators of Artillery Duel, Xonox, were most noted for their gimmick of “double ender” cartridges. The “double ender” cartridge looked more or less like two Atari cartridges fused end to end, and you could insert one side or the other depending on what game you wanted to play. Two games for the price of one, as it were. There were various combinations, and Artillery Duel appeared no less than 3 times in the Xonox collection coupled with the lamentable Chuck Norris Superkicks...

M-Network, the not-so-secret identity of Mattel Electronics, makers of the Intellivision, brought several Intellivision ports over to the 2600. Today's subject was a port of Intellivision's answer to Atari's Combat, Armor Battle. Although this port, retitled Armor Ambush, doesn't come close to achieving the depth of gameplay provided by Armor Battle, it is still an excellent port, and definitely provides some much needed depth to the Combat formula.

I sat down to spend a little quality time with the games of yore on the venerable Atari 2600. First out of the box was 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe. This was one of the ''launch titles'' for the Atari 2600. However, when held up to such classics of that time, games such as Combat, Adventure, Night Driver and the seminal Space Invaders, 3D Tic-Tac-Toe doesn't hold up very well.