Review Archives (All Reviews)

You are currently looking through all reviews for Atari 2600 games. Below, you will find reviews written by all eligible authors and sorted according to date of submission, with the newest content displaying first. As many as 20 results will display per page. If you would like to try a search with different parameters, specify them below and submit a new search.

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	Keystone Kapers review (A2600) Reviewed on March 08, 2005 The Atari 2600 has always been home to many classic games, including that darn Pitfall series. There were also some underrated games made for the system, including Solaris (best Atari 2600 game ever??) and Kaboom! And who could forget the immortal classics such as Pitfall, Pitfall 2, River Raid, and Adventure? There was also another underrated game that I enjoyed playing very very much, named Keystone Kapers. The gameplay was fast, fun, and furious, and became very addcitve quickly. It may not h...
	Ice Hockey review (A2600) Reviewed on March 08, 2005 When it comes to sports, I have always been a big fan. I have enjoyed many sports over the years. However, I have never really been a huge hockey fan. Needless to say, I still played hockey and watched hockey on television from time to time. My all time favorite sports team (Pittsburgh Penguins) is a hockey team. But, I just have not gotten into the sport of hockey as much as I expected.
	Basketball review (A2600) Reviewed on November 01, 2004 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...
	Air-Sea Battle review (A2600) Reviewed on October 27, 2004 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 ...
	Math Gran Prix review (A2600) Reviewed on October 26, 2004 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.
	Fast Eddie review (A2600) Reviewed on October 26, 2004 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...
	Color Bar Generator review (A2600) Reviewed on October 26, 2004 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).
	Bridge review (A2600) Reviewed on October 26, 2004 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.
	Air Raiders review (A2600) Reviewed on October 26, 2004 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.
	The A-Team review (A2600) Reviewed on October 26, 2004 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.
	Battlezone review (A2600) Reviewed on October 25, 2004 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?''
	Basic Math review (A2600) Reviewed on October 25, 2004 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.
	Double Dragon review (A2600) Reviewed on July 21, 2004 You’ve got to give Activision credit for ignoring both the hardware’s obvious limitations and a dose of common sense to throw caution to the wind and attempt it anyway. Pity that you can’t give them credit for the game itself.
	Jungle Fever/Knight on the Town review (A2600) Reviewed on July 15, 2004 Knight on the Town is both excessively short and excessively pointless, its graphics laughable and its eroticism humiliatingly poor. In other words, a quintessential example of Atari pornography.
	Base Attack review (A2600) Reviewed on June 27, 2004 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.
	Pitfall II: Lost Caverns review (A2600) Reviewed on May 20, 2004 Spend enough time reading the legends and myths of ancient Greece and you might come upon the jolly tale of a man named Sisyphus. This poor chap did something or other to royally tick off the gods and was sentenced to an eternity of suffering in Hades. To be more specific, Sisyphus was forced to roll a large rock up a steep hill. However, when he got said rock to the top, it would simply roll back down the other side, forcing him to start over.
	Adventure review (A2600) Reviewed on January 26, 2004 When one thinks of the Atari 2600, odds are that the words ''Role-Playing Game'' will not immediately spring to mind. After all, this incredibly simple video gaming machine was far more suited to simple arcade-style games where the primary goal was to stay alive until the game's speed exceeded the player's reflexes, such as members of the Pac-Man and Donkey Kong family. More complex games with set goals (such as Adventure, Haunted House and Riddle of the Sphinx) were produced far less frequently...
	Acid Drop review (A2600) Reviewed on January 01, 2004 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 ...
	Barnstorming review (A2600) Reviewed on January 01, 2004 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.
	Assault review (A2600) Reviewed on December 25, 2003 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.

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