POLL POLL: Favorite Arcade Game On The Atari 2600

For those who still play their Atari 2600, get the multi cartridge with the SD card in the top.

You can load every single game ever made onto the SD and have them all at your finger tips! Super awesome!

It's only about $75 and well worth it.

Damn, you and this thread just made me buy a Harmony Cartridge. LOL - good times. :)
 
I think it would be Berzerk followed by Missile Command for me.

Both really good ones. Berzerk was hurt by the lack of maze variations (arcade had 876 unique variations) and the robots' inability to shoot diagonally, and I think the humanoid and robots were a little out-of-scale compare to the arcade version, but it was pretty damned good. I played that one a lot.
 
For those who still play their Atari 2600, get the multi cartridge with the SD card in the top.

You can load every single game ever made onto the SD and have them all at your finger tips! Super awesome!

It's only about $75 and well worth it.


they made a new one? Sounds cool. I have cuttle cart 2 for 7800 to cover the 2600 stuff. I also have cuttle cart 3 for intv, and atarimax carts for 5200, 8bit, coleco. I also have two vectrex multicarts.
 
I played a lot of Demon Attack, Cosmic Ark, Chopper Command, Combat, Yar's Revenge, Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac-Man BITD. The 2600 is currently crammed onto a shelf but I pull it out for the kids once in a while. They love it.
 
Defender, Space Invaders and Asteroids in that order. Pac Man literally made me cry. I remember breaking my parents down until they bought the game and it being one of the biggest disappointments in my 10 year old life. #firstworldproblems
 
As I kid, I didn't know I was supposed to hate Pac-Man on the 2600.

You weren't supposed to, you just did after waiting so long, and only knowing the original Pac Man in the arcades, it was a huge disappointment.

I remember I used to borrow games from a friend who always had the newest game. I was amazed how fast he let me borrow Pac Man after it came out. He didn't want to play it any more and neither did I.

I would have over a 1 million dollars right now if I would have invested that $29.99 that I saved my mom and dad from having to shell out for that piece of crap let down...

And once again, I say every fan of the 2600 should buy a Harmony multi cart for yours. Every Game, Any Game, you want. Super Cool.

I really loved Adventure, and now that there is a homebrew Adventure II, it makes the Harmony Cart even more cool.

And this new game sounds cool Fall Down

I'm gonna buy that one!
 
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Agreed. I played Pac Man on the 2600 before I ever played it in the arcade.

So, now that you know that, how do you feel?

:eek:

It Sucked!

At least Space Invaders WAS Space Invaders...yeah, I'm old.
 
So what's your favorite Atari 2600 cartridge that's an actual arcade game?

For the sake of this thread, Pac Man is not an option...:D

Not sure why some keep submitting non-arcade titles.

Anyway, re: 2600 Pac-Man...obviously the '83 crash would've happened no matter what (too many consoles for a market that couldn't possibly support them all, too much substandard product, no real good review sources to help consumers ascertain the quality of each game, etc), but as many know, Atari manufactured 12 million Pac-Man cartridges despite a user base of about 10 million VCSs. Atari thought people would want to play Pac-Man so badly that 2 million more consumers would buy a system and Pac-Man...and that EVERY current owner would also buy a copy.

Sure, it was beyond stupid thinking and almost hard to believe someone would sign off on a decision like that...but part of me wonders if Atari had produced a GOOD version of Pac-Man (some homebrews have proven it was possible), how history might have been altered (if only slightly). As has been discussed, there were actually very solid arcade conversions for the 2600 that came out before and after Pac-Man, but you hear much more about how crappy Pac-Man was than you do about how good those other ports were (for the hardware they were running on).
 
The new Star Castle cartridge is superb. Played it last fall in Houston. Hard as heck.

Gotta go with Yar's Revenge overall.
But asteroids and chopper command were heavily played.

I'm likely from the earlier era of 2600 where we were amazed by Night Driver and played a ton of Outlaw or Combat.
 
On a similar note.....

As I kid, I didn't know I was supposed to hate Pac-Man on the 2600. Same thing with the Ewoks.

Didn't shell out the money for Pacman on the VCS, so it didn't hurt so bad. I didn't have any unrealistic expectations. Knew there was no way it could look like the arcade. Was able to see the tech for what it was.

On a similar note..... my son never knew he was supposed to hate Jar-Jar, so he doesn't. Let's not fill the kids with our childhood dissapointments - they will have plenty of their own. I am so glad that I didn't grow up in an Internet-enabled world. :)

And.......never hated the Ewoks, and I still don't.
 
My fave's were Pitfall and River Raid. But since the question was you favorite port. Mine has to be one that I didn't know until a couple of years ago was a port. Warlords. Me and my friends would get on there and play the hell out of it. And it was always Play Atari...
 
Didn't shell out the money for Pacman on the VCS, so it didn't hurt so bad. I didn't have any unrealistic expectations. Knew there was no way it could look like the arcade. Was able to see the tech for what it was.

On a similar note..... my son never knew he was supposed to hate Jar-Jar, so he doesn't. Let's not fill the kids with our childhood dissapointments - they will have plenty of their own. I am so glad that I didn't grow up in an Internet-enabled world. :)

And.......never hated the Ewoks, and I still don't.
Amen, brother!
 
Didn't shell out the money for Pacman on the VCS, so it didn't hurt so bad. I didn't have any unrealistic expectations. Knew there was no way it could look like the arcade. Was able to see the tech for what it was.

On a similar note..... my son never knew he was supposed to hate Jar-Jar, so he doesn't. Let's not fill the kids with our childhood dissapointments - they will have plenty of their own. I am so glad that I didn't grow up in an Internet-enabled world. :)

And.......never hated the Ewoks, and I still don't.

Except that Ms. Pac-Man did look and play (within reason) like the arcade. So did other 2600 arcade conversions, both before AND after Pac-Man. No one expected arcade-perfect...anyone with a brain knew that the VCS wasn't capable of that...hell, even the far-closer Atari 800/5200 versions were still pretty far from arcade-perfect. But players had every right to expect something at least within a few (hundred) miles of the ballpark on their VCSs.

At the very least, would it have been too much to ask for the maze to be blue, and the background to be black? Or to design a maze that bore even a passing resemblance to the arcade version? I know the background wasn't black in the VCS Ms. Pac-Man, but that game got SO many other things right, that the background color wasn't an issue (and those mazes looked fine even with the colored background...they actually worked out quite nicely).

It's also fair to point out that the arcade version of Pac-Man was released in October 1980, and the 2600 version followed in March 1982. That's a fair amount of time to have come up with something better, and one could argue that, if anything, giving the game even more time in development (possibly even waiting until the holiday season) would've been the best way to go...all hindsight now of course.

All this being said, like many others, I played it plenty...as did many other 2600 owners. Although deep down we knew it wasn't good, it said "Pac-Man" on the cartridge and the very basics of the gameplay were there, so we played it. And we were something approaching grateful.
 
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I don't want to pee in anyone's corn flakes here....... BUT..........

Yeah, Pac-Man stunk. But to be honest, it was my personal second biggest "big name" disappointment. Some of you have already called it as one of your favorites.... and that's fine. But I found Defender to be even worse than Pac-Man. At least with Pac-Man, your on screen character didn't disappear when doing something. Your ship in Defender, would streak off as a lightning bolt when you press the fire button.

Considering how well Stargate/Defender II came out...... just made my disappointment all the worse.

You guys talking about the Harmony cart.... I don't have one.... but I have played some amazing homebrews on the 2600. Boulder Dash being the top of the heap.
 
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