Atari Shrine

Adventure (1980): Running around looking for keys and keeping away from all the dragons, especially the dreaded red dragon. Damn bat stealing my keys all the time. There was a great easter-egg in this game where you could walk through a wall somewhere and see the programmer’s names in a secret room or something.

Breakout (1978): Yes…the timeless Breakout. Using the ever-versitile Atari "paddle-wheel" control, you bounce the ball through the bricks. Oddly therapeutic. I loved the mode where the ball would eat through all the bricks instead of just one at a time. Well, ok, it was fun for a while, but I just can’t see myself plopping down on the sofa with a six-pack and wanting to spend the night playing Breakout, no matter how fond my memories might be.

Defender (1982): A disappointing adaption of the arcade game. Far too easy even on the hardest levels. The graphics are terrible, flickering so bad that the aliens can’t really be seen sometimes. There’s a little "feature" in this game that makes your ship disappear whenever you fire, so if you fire fast enough (which most 12 year old kids could do at that time), then the aliens couldn’t shoot you.

Gorf (1981): If I could have back all the quarters I stuck into this arcade game…man, I played this one like mad! The game had 4 very distinct levels, a space invaders-esque first level, galaxians like level 2, a bizzare black hole level next, and finally the typical mother ship. What is cool about Gorf is that if you miss the enemies, you can press fire again and your original missile will disappear so you don’t have to wait for it to leave the screen. The Atari version is fairly faithful to this, but lacks the up-and-down mobility of the arcade version. Otherwise, it’s pretty fun, if not a little too easy.

Indy 500 (1977): An awesome little game full of cool variations make what appears to be a boring "race the blocky cars around the track" game into something that has amazing replay value! Besides the standard "race", there are ice tracks, "tag" variations, and a crash-to-score variant. With a single-player time-trial mode, you could skip school and practice all day in order to kick your friends’s butts!

Joust (1983): Although this game appears to be a brutally stripped-down version of the arcade game, it is still a lot of fun. Knock the enemies off their ostriches by flying higher than them when you collide, collect eggs, avoid the, *ahem*, lava at the bottom. Even has a fun 2 player mode just like the arcade.

Night Driver (1980): Break out the paddle-control and put on your seat belt. A simple "driving" game where you hurtle down a dark road avoiding other cars, trying to best your time on different tracks, including a random track option. Simplistic to the extreme, could still be fun to blob out with for a while.

Pac Man (1981): Oh man, how I looked forward to this game! After who-knows-how-many quarters I shoved into Pac Man at the arcades, I finally got my eager little hands on the Atari version one day in 1981. When I first played it, my jaw hit the ground and I said, "What the hell is this!?" What a disappointment.The ghosts flicker so bad they are hard to see sometimes, the little escape tunnel is on the top and bottom of the map instead of the left and right (as it is in the arcade game), and Pac Man’s face itself only changes directions when you turn left and right, i.e., when you go up and down he still keeps chomping his mouth to the side. Boring, way too easy, and crappy graphics. What a disappointment!

Pitfall (1982): Another great way to waste a summer day by sitting inside playing Atari. Pitfall Harry runs through this horizontally scrolling jungle, collecting bars of gold and silver, swinging over quicksand and crocodiles, running from snakes and scorpions, crawling through tunnels…this game was truly innovative and the game play is awesome! You had a time limit in which you had to collect the most amount of gold and silver…and as always, try to complete the "perfect" game of collecting ALL the gold bars in the time limit was a true challenge!

Riddle of the Sphinx (1982): A nifty little adventure game that was a hell of a lot of fun to play. You wandered through the "desert" collecting items to offer to "Ra" at the end of the map. Along the way you must avoid theives and scorpions. Furthermore, Isis and Anubis wander around the desert to help and hinder you respectively. A fun little puzzle to solve on various difficulty levels.

Sky Jinks (1982): In this, *ahem*, game, you fly around pylons in a aerial race-course while avoiding ballons and trees. You try to get the best time you can while flying through courses of various length (up to 99 pylons). Flying the plane was fun when you got the hang of tight-cornering around the pylons, but there really isn’t much more to it than that. Dull.

Slot Racers (1978): A totally crappy game. Graphics suck, even for 1978, I mean, c’mon! Game play was slow and you had to kill you opponent 25 times to "win"…faaagiddaboutit!

Space Invaders (1980): What can I say about this game that hasn’t been said already? A legendary game, full of variations such as moving shields, wiggling bullets, invisible aliens, and any combination there of. Fun to "mutate" giving strange alien layouts. Don’t forget the classic "double-bullet" cheat by holding down the reset button when you power up the game…gives you the ability to have two bullets on the screen at the same time!

Spike’s Peak (1983): Holy crap! I LOVED this game! You had to scale a mountain with different "enemies" trying to stop you: bears, bees, eagles. For some reason, your little dude was really slow and you get killed a hell of a lot, making this game oddly difficult to finish. If I remember right, this was a fun one to "mutate" with the on-off switch.

Surround (1977): Just like the Tron "light cycles", you had to out-smart and out-maneuver your opponent, forcing him to crash into the walls. It was always kind of fun to go into the stores that had this game on display and "write" the F-word on the screen using your controller…heh heh. Otherwise, this game is about as minimalistic as you can get. Single-player is possible with a totally moronic AI opponent that would pretty much end up killing himself if you just stayed out of its way. Didn’t really burn up too much time on this one.

Target Fun (1983): Yeee-Haaaa! It doesn’t get more fun than this…NOT! Shooting square "bullets" at various slow moving targets was not my idea of a good waste of time. You could only have one bullet on the screen at a time, so if you missed a targety, you couldn’t shoot again until your first bullet had left the screen. Yawwwwnnn….Had a stupid single-player version with an artificial "intelligence" opponent that just shot all the time regardless of the position of the target.

Venture (1982): A pretty lame version of the arcade game which was pretty damn cool. A bare-boned "adventure" game, you walked around from room to room and gathered items for points. In the arcade game you had an arrow that you would shoot, but in the Atari version it was just a dot! Pretty boring…needless to say this one didn’t get a lot of playtime at our house.

Video Pinball (1981): Who doesn’t remember spending sunny summer afternoons curled up in a dark basement with this one. A lot of fun dispite the obvious design flaws. You bounced a square "ball" around the simple pinball "machine" and racked up points along the way. The so called "spinners" would actully slow down the ball, and after you got the hang of "nudging" the ball, you could bounce it from the top of the bumper up through the rollover slots over, and over, and over, and over, and over….racking up some amazing scores! Addicting as hell!