Well this was certainly unexpected. If you'll allow me to spin you a yarn, I'll give some backstory on this. To begin with I've owned this game for less than 12 hours, so this is some first take here. I went to the local video game store to kill some time with my son, and in the Atari section of games in between the copious copies of Combat and Asteroids there was this weird rounded cartridge that had a white end label with the title Strategy X. At this point my focus on Atari collecting is the weirder and/or rarer stuff, Strategy X fits that bill. And how could it not? The cartridge doesn't look like any other cartridge with its rounded edge, it was published by Konami which is also really strange.

Konami was a developer of a lot of arcade games like Frogger, Tutankham, and Super Cobra which were all published by Parker Brothers on the 2600. I'm not entirely sure why they licensed those and decided to publish this. They only published 3 games for the 2600 and they didn't start until 1983. Just kind of a weird back story. Maybe they were just trying to make a little more cash from the video game fad. But now to the game!

Strategy X is a vertically scrolling shooter where you take command of a tank trying to make it through a gauntlet of enemy guns and planes dropping missiles. The game is broken up into two halves: scene 1 where you attack stationary gun positions (machine guns I guess), and scene 2 where you have to dodge missiles being shot by planes. During both levels you constantly have to re-fuel otherwise you will explode.

Rare games are weird, because nobody bought them. Sometimes this means you're dealing with an overlooked hidden gem in a console library. Other times this means you were spared from playing garbage. This is closer to garbage. The whole game feels like it could just fall apart at any minute. The screen kind of shifts at random, the movement kind of feels jittery, and the whole thing is just kind of a pain to control. You can't shoot at an angle, but the enemies in the gun turrets sure can. The plane section is a little better, you just have to dodge the missiles, the planes themselves will just fly over you.

The fuel situation is also not great because the enemies can shoot the fuel. Your fuel gauge will be almost zero, you're going for the fuel and BAM fuel gets destroyed by the enemy. Take River Raid for example, YOU can shoot the fuel (you can here too) but the enemies can't. It's like the game is punishing you for no reason. On the subject of fuel, flying into the colored section can be done, but uses more fuel and it just never seems worth it. MAAAAAYBE to avoid an enemy, but by the time you've made it through the color area you've used too much fuel and you'll probably die anyway. I guess it's there to just give you a fighting chance to move around those areas as the screen is scrolling.

Really this game just needed more polish. There are a bunch of other examples of this kind of game on the 2600 that did this concept better, especially by 1983. At least it has opening music I guess? There's a positive. D.

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I just got a 2600 junior and I have a plugged into the TV with a coaxial input and I just wanted to know why it looks like this

Hey guys, as you know the Apple IIc monitor is a monitor and not a Television, so it only has RF input designed for plug in from an Apple II system, if I try to plug in a normal RF cable from the Atari, nothing happens, on channel 2 or 3, how do I connect my Atari 2600 to an Apple IIc monitor?

Thanks.

I don't know if it works or if it has any issues though since I got this from my dad's old house when he passed. also how much do repairs for this usually cost?

It's time for another entry in what I'm calling the "children's series" (so called for the AtariAge named "children's" label on the cartridge) with Pigs in Space by Atari. Pigs in Space, based on the sketch from The Muppet Show, is a 3-in-1 cart containing 3 games loosely based on the property.

Game 1 is a Space Invaders clone called Chickenvaders in which you have to kill an invading horde of chickens before they kill you. Gonzo flies around in a UFO from time to time that you can shoot down also.

Game 2 is a clone of Frogger, or Freeway called Pastaroids where you control Miss Piggy and have to dodge spaghetti and meatballs to get back to the starship Swintrek. If you hit anything, you basically just get pushed back, but you can karate chop the spaghetti and meatballs to make it a little easier to move through.

Finally, Game 3, Escape from Planet of the Gonzoids, is a scrolling shooter through a canyon where you pilot the Swinetrek trying navigate your way through the canyon and the shooting Gonzoids. You can shoot back in an arcing trajectory based on the last direction you move (left or right).

If you care about getting a high score, you can basically just play the same game over and over again. The games aren't played in a sequence, you choose them after each time you play them, and the difficulty doesn't increase. What you see is what you get. That makes for a relatively shallow experience because you effectively just have these three levels that you play coninuously until you lose all your lives.

Despite that, the games you get are decent with Escape from Planet of the Gonzoids being the best. That one is probably the most original of the three, with that hooked shot being the main driver in that originality. If this game was released with only ONE of these games it would be ranking much lower. Also, I have to give it points for using the Muppets property. I love the Muppets. Kinda weird that this was the only game that used the Muppets though (not counting the Sesame Street Muppets), but maybe that's for the best, makes this one a bit more special. B.

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I posted this on another forum, but maybe I'll have luck here.

In the 80s, I recall Pitfall! (NTSC) having an unusual visual: when standing directly below Harry, the scorpian would alternate between the left facing and right facing characters rapidly, creating a flickering (mirrored) effect. I have not been able to reproduce this. Now, the scorpian simply freezes in place until Harry moves again.

This was NOT Pitfall II or Pitfall on another console. It was Pitfall! for the 2600

Could it have been the TV? A different ROM version? I attempted to recreate the effect with a switch box on an older television. Does anyone else remember this visual effect?

First off, I would like to say that I don't hate the 2600+. I think it's a great idea to increase interest in the Atari brand. But I think in a few ways it's kind of underwhelming for its $130 price point. I'll list why.

• It's basically a 7800 with built-in HDMI, since a 7800 can play both 2600 and 7800 games.
• Long load times vs. original hardware due to emulation (even with emulation on computers it doesn't take long, not sure why it's this way on the 2600+)
• Cartridge-only system, no preloaded games; which leads to:
• No real value over buying a 7800. On average one costs $50 less than the 2600+, and does practically the same thing with faster load times.
• HDMI and USB-C mods can be installed for cheap on 2600/7800 consoles, if you have the expertise.
• You can still use 2600 controllers with a 7800.

Being on a bit of a sports kick, I chose the long winded RealSports Boxing by Atari. Real Sports Boxing is a later 2600 release coming out in 1987. In it you chose from 4 boxers to try and beat the snot out of the other guy. Yeah, this won't be the longest of write ups.

I like this game. The graphics are great, and the sound effects work for a boxing game. On top of all that, there is a crowd that moves AND a character select screen. Truly remarkable stuff for the 2600 in my opinion. Movement is good, punching controls are a little weird, but honestly the punches all seem to be pretty similar.

Unfortunately the game is pretty simple. I honestly don't know how you wouldn't always knock out your opponent in this. I basically just jabbed the guy to death and got a KO on the first go round. So, no, the game is not that difficult and you could probably beat every character in about 15 minutes. This, again, is a game probably better played with 2 actual humans. Having said that, the presentation definitely gives this game an edge over others. B.

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I picked up two intellivision games thinking they were Atari games

Do you like the L6er console with the orange paint intact? Or do you prefer the bezel border to be black to match with the console's main color?

For me, I prefer the bezel border to be black on L6ers. I just think it ties in better to the rest of the console, and gives it a sleeker, more modern look.

After Frostbite I didn't just want to start ripping through the rest of the Activision games, I need to give myself something to look forward to. So, I dug through some carts on the back of the shelf AND LO! Bowling! Bowling, by Atari, is a game where you...play a game of bowling. See how exciting that is?

There are 6 variations: steerable ball, straight ball, and curve ball each available for 1 or 2 players. Curve ball is interesting, you throw the ball and move the joystick once to give it spin. Straight ball is when you throw a...straight ball. And steerable ball allows you to move the ball all over. I think straight ball is the most straight forward, but it feels pretty boring. Steerable ball is really difficult to try and get the ball to hit the most pins, and curve ball really should only be used to pick up spares.

I don't know about this one. It's playable, even slightly fun in pretty small doses, it's just kind of boring which sucks because there just isn't much to say. Like, there is some entertainment value, but not enough to really hold your attention for more than a few minutes. Unlike something like Tennis, or even Golf, it's still the same kind of thing every single time. Sure, there might be the odd pin to pick up, but for me there just isn't enough to this to really come back to it. C.

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Can the 2600 junior play 7800 games

Today I picked Frostbite, by Activision. In Frostbite, you control "Frostbite Bailey" to jump on ice flows to collect ice blocks to build igloos. While you are doing this, you have to avoid enemies between the flows, bears on the shore, and the dropping temperature. If you touch a crab, a clam, or a bird, you will be pushed off the flow and into the freezing water. If the temperature goes to zero you freeze to death. If you get caught by a bear, you just get eaten. Once you collect enough ice flows by jumping from row to row, an entrance will appear that you can go into.

First, this game looks gorgeous. Activision games always felt like the programmers knew how to get every ounce of performance out of the 2600, and games like this showcase it. There is a multicolored sunrise/sunset in the back ground, Bailey is well detailed with his giant hat, and combined with the blue and white of the main play area it makes for a really colorful experience to look at. Along with this, we have a day/night progression. I'm not sure how many times that had been used before (I think Enduro came out before this) but it definitely shows some creativity and technical prowess.

What good is a game without good gameplay? Frostbite shines here as well. To get ice blocks you have to touch an ice flow and when you do the flow changes color; touching it again won't give you another block until ALL flows have been touched. This means, to build your igloo you will have to continually jump up and down across the river. This creates a pretty hectic game when trying to jump from flow to flow all while dodging enemies. The only comparison I could make is if you combined Q*bert and Frogger together, that sort of comes close. But like any great Activision game, it's more than that. You aren't jumping around just for the sake of jumping around, you are jumping around to build your igloo. There feels to be more of a point.

I have no complaints about this one. It looks great, it plays great, even the manual is nice. Frostbite is an absolute joy to play and a great release by Activision. Absolute S tier.

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I recent bought a “ working” vcs at a swap meet. The seller showed the console running and I bought it.

Playing a longer session at home the bad tv signal showed up. Upon starting a game, everything is fine. The picture in fact is quite good. Little to no noise on the screen. Once I play for perhaps 3 minutes, the signal becomes very noisy and colourless. This gets “fixed” by power cycling the console. I’ve tried both channel 2 and 3 and both exhibit the same behaviour. I’ve opened up the device and cleaned the RF outlet with alcohol to see if that would do anything. It did not.

Any advice or help is greatly appreciated.

Time for another arcade port: Q*bert released by Parker Brothers. Q*bert was an arcade hit in which you control Q*bert who is an orange...something. Seriously what the hell is Q*bert? Maybe he's related to the Snorks. I don't know. Anyway, you control Q*bert and you need to touch every block in the pattern and change the color. Sometimes you only have to hit it once; sometimes you have to hit each face multiple times. While this is happening you have to dodge globs of goop and monsters, but you can kill the other monsters. It's a great game, but nowadays it doesn't seem like people care too much about Q*bert, he doesn't show up that often anymore which is too bad.

So let's talk about the 2600 port: It's great! I love Q*bert, and this port is really well done. I think it really captures the gameplay and fun of the arcade game that other arcade ports on the 2600 sometimes fail to do. The only slight I have is the control. Pushing left jumps you up and to the left, up jumps you up and to the right, down jumps you down and to the left, and right jumps you down and to the right. It is awkward the first time. In the arcade, the joystick was mounted with a 45 degree clockwise rotation so you could only move it like the patterns on the screen. You really have to do the same thing here, makes the whole movement a lot easier to manage.

Aside from that it is perfect. Q*bert looks identifiably Q*bert, the monsters look like the monsters, and even all the colors look pretty bright and vibrant like the arcade. For a 2600 port you can't really do much better than this. I wish all of the other 2600 ports could have been as good as this. A!

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I grew up in the nineties. The Atari was this ancient, arcane thing that I had never seen in person. In fact, I still have never seen a 2600 in person. The oldest console I've ever seen in person was a Colecovision that a friend had gotten as a hand-me-down. Even my first console was a NES that I had received second hand in 1990. So, I'm decidedly a millennial coming at this from a latter day perspective.

What do I like about these old games? As a programmer myself, I appreciate the restrictive memory limits that these developers had to deal with. Some of them truly made magic with such little space. These games are also the direct precursors to everything that came after them. I'm a big shmup fan, and pretty much all shmups descend from Space Invaders and other shooters on the 2600. A lot of these games are, for a lack of better word, cute, but also very often awesome, and addictive in ways I never realized the earliest video games could be before playing them.

I wanted to list my favorite hidden gems that I discovered, as a millennial with a decidedly different perspective than those who grew up with these.

Battlezone

Shocked at how good this game looks. The horizon moves with your tank, which you see in gorgeous third person, and the colors are fantastic looking. The static you see when you are hit is so awesome, it's practically Amiga demoscene worthy. Lots of fun. They could have half assed this port and made it just vector graphics, but they went several steps further.

BMX Air Master

I still don't understand how to get my bicycle to accelerate consistently. I feel pretty dumb playing this one, but it's a gorgeous game, and when I occasionally hit the right button presses to properly launch the bike into the air, I can see the appeal. They really put a lot of time and effort to make BMX Air Master look supremely polished. If anyone has any tips on getting the bike moving, please, I'm all ears. This game looks fun as hell, and I'm an idiot, apparently. I take it you're supposed to flip the joystick left and right repeatedly? Sigh.

California Games

On the NES, this game can't compete. But on the 2600, it's one of the better games, and the graphics are next level. Surprisingly complex mechanics.

Crash Dive

This game feels more modern than the average 2600 shooter. Beautifully colored graphics and more modern shmup mechanics than its contemporaries. In fact, I would call this one of the more gorgeous 2600 games, period, and a real hidden gem. The splash effect when you go underwater is really cool. Easily one of the best shooters on the system.

Communist Mutants from Outer Space

It's Space Invaders! But better! And with communist mutants! A game setting that only could have come from the Reagan years. Hilarious title, but great shooter.

Dragonstomper

I'm shocked that this even exists! I just wish that, instead of trying to make a linear, "narrative" driven "RPG" (lots of air quotes here), they instead made something like Treasures of Tarmin or Tower of Doom for the Intellivision. A more roguelike experience would allow for more emergent gameplay in less memory space. This is still really cool, although it makes decisions that I probably wouldn't have made as a developer.

Enduro

This doesn't feel at all like a racer as we knew it even at the end of the eighties, but it's closer to Out Run than Pole Position. I like the changing graphical environment over time. It's kind of limited, but cool nonetheless.

H.E.R.O.

Almost a precursor to Metroid, with the multiscreen problem solving and multiple mechanics. Surprised at the depth of this one, and the water graphics at the bottom look really cool, kind of like Pitfall. This one makes a good companion piece to Pitfall.

Montezuma's Revenge

Even more Metroid than H.E.R.O., but maybe a bit more Prince of Persia. The graphics are more simple than the other games I loved, but the multilevel maze is kind of mind-blowing for this generation of console games. Also, the twitching, cockroach-like corpse of your character after falling to your doom is hilarious.

Pitfall I & II

Obviously, I was going to love these games. They are basically essentials, and I get why they were big sellers for the 2600. These two games pretty much invented platforming as we know it.

Robot Tank

I was surprised and impressed by this one. It's Battlezone, but with more advanced damage mechanics, and an environment where the sun sets and rises, and the beautiful colors change to match. There's even fog that occasionally sets in. Basically the sequel to Battlezone, but even better in some ways, and the presentation is damn near artistic.

Secret Quest

Another game that I went into blind without the instruction manual, but it ended up being fairly easy to figure out, even if I didn't quite understand everything at first pass. People call Adventure the precursor to Zelda, but I honestly feel like Secret Quest is the real progenitor. The way you swing that sword is so singularly Zelda, that I can't believe people look to Adventure when Secret Quest exists.

Skateboardin'

Love the multiscreen gameplay and fairly interesting mechanics, like being able to go on foot as well as riding your skateboard. Love this game as well as the 7800 sequel, which turns Skateboardin' into a fledgeling Metroidvania.

Solaris

Pretty much my favorite game for the system. It's such a fantastically detailed space simulator, I'm impressed with how this was able to fit within the cart. It makes me want to study the assembly code just to see how it was done. I love how it took Star Raiders and made a more immediately playable game out of it. It includes strategy elements without feeling slow at all--you constantly feel like everything is moving, time is slipping away, and you are seconds from losing everything. The graphics are gorgeous as well. Some parts are a little silly, in ways only a game from the mid eighties could be (I don't understand how the circular "debris" flying at you constantly in each space area are "neutral planets" that you can somehow accidentally obliterate with a single shot of your dinky laser--very silly), but it all just adds to the charm. Solaris is THE essential 2600 game.

Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator

I love Star Trek, so I'm probably overlooking some serious mechanical deficiencies in this game, but I find the interface quite unique for a 2600 game, and it's honestly not a terrible use of the license (there will be worse Star Trek games, believe it or not).

Stellar Track

As a programmer with a love for early programming experiments, I'm both amused and amazed that they were able to fit the original Star Trek strategy game from 1971 onto a 2600 cart. I wish they could have added graphical elements--but maybe the game was bursting at the seams already. The lack of graphics (it's a hilariously rote port of the original) make it feel like a homebrew. I like it, though.

Survival Island

I usually don't like games with levels that are completely different from one another--it makes the game feel like a series of cheap minigames. This game is high quality enough, with complex enough mechanics, that I can excuse it. It's got a breakneck pace from the start and I like the resource management.

Turmoil

Not much to say about this one, other than I found the gameplay to be perfect. Action distilled into a perfect little "blow everything up good" kind of game. Reminds me of Beamrider, except it is a lot more fun and easy to play. Doesn't let up, and has a fairly original gameplay premise.

This was the closest I could get to as an April Fool's joke so let's just get these out of the way. There is absolutely no reason to not do both of these together because there just isn't to say about Bridge and Checkers. Activision made a ton of great games for the 2600. These are not those. I bought both of these to try and get a complete set of Activision games. Almost did it to, I'm only missing Double Dragon. Jokes on me I guess for picking these up. I'm really not sure why I honestly, let's get into it.

Checkers is...checkers. That's it. I suppose it has a slight 3D look, but aside from that it is just checkers. It plays fine, probably the quintessential checkers game on the Atari 2600, but what does that even mean? Even the best version of checkers is still JUST checkers, and I'm not really a fan of checkers. There is no point in playing this today, and I'm not sure how much point there was to play it then. D.

And Bridge I'm completely lost for one simple reason: there are no instructions about how to play Bridge. This is direct from the manual, "Bridge by ACTIVISION was designed for people who already know how to ploy the game. It won't teach you the basics — you'll want to read a good instructional book or take some classes for that. But it will give you virtually unlimited opportunities to practice what you learn and sharpen your game — at your own pace." Even from the manual it looks like this was made specifically so that Larry Kaplan could play bridge by himself. Who knows. What I know is that without instructions on how to play it, you can't play it. I think by definition that has to make this an F.

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