List-Mania: The Atari 2600

DAY 6 List-Mania Friday!

I apologize to those that were eagerly awaiting the conclusion to my 'When Kristy Met Matt' series of columns. It will come back Saturday. I have decided that every Friday will be List-Mania! Since I like making lists I thought it would be fun to have a weekly column devoted to the list.

The topic this week is one of the greatest toys ever invented, the old Atari 2600. When I look back on Christmas, I really remember the one where my sister and I scored the Atari 2600. We each got a game with it too. I still have the old system and it still works. Years later I replaced it with the Atari 7800. That system had a few cool games on it but the best thing is that it was backwards compatible. Every once in a while I will dig out the old Atari and play the all the games. The only game that I didn't have as a kid that I wanted real bad was Frogger. One day I will snag this game for myself.

So here are my Top 5 Atari games from when I was a kid.

5) Ghostbusters
I'm not sure why I liked this game so much but even now I will dig it out and play it out to the finish. Catching those ghosts can be frustrating and some of the logistics were silly. I mean really, you defeat the big Stay Puft Marshmallow Man by walking underneath him? It still made a fun game. Oh, and make sure you spend the money to pick up the vacuum to suck up the ghosts when you drive from warehouse to warehouse.

4) Vanguard
Getting to the main bad guy was hard but beating the last guy, not so much. I think the reason why I liked it so much was that you can shoot from all directions. There were a variety of bad guys and pitfalls to avoid. But the ending was horrible. One shot killed the bad guy. But you got to play it again, this time faster! I played this for hours and hours.

3) Pitfall
My sister Jennifer got this game for Christmas when we got the Atari. This game certainly had its charm although crossing the crocodiles was very frustrating. I only made it the full twenty minutes only once and always failed in getting all the treasures. It seems that the silver bars were the most rare. But what frustrated me more was when I would go down the ladder and hop over that stupid scorpion and end up trapped by a brick wall!

2) Ms. Pac-man
I got this game for Christmas when we got the Atari and this was a fantastic game. Much better than the horrible Pac-Man, this actually felt like the arcade game. It had its own mazes and you can change the difficulty so you could get rid of that pesky red ghost!



1) Joust
I loved/hated the arcade game. Loved it because it was different and fun but hated it because I sucked at it. My parents thought it was cute how the ostrich would screech with its feet when it came to a stop after a run so they bought the Atari version. I spent hours and hours trying to get the highest score (and I think it was around 800,000 or so) and the levels became just all those fast blue birds. And hitting that stupid pterodactyl right on the nose was next to impossible.

Man, this totally makes me want to dig out the Atari and play some games. I had a ton of games but unfortunately I didn't have the M*A*S*H* Atari game. I borrowed it from a friend and had it for two weeks and I played it non-stop. I visited our local game store and they had one but it cost $9.99. Not sure I want to pay that much for an Atari game.

If you want to go back in time and revisit the golden age of video games, I highly recommend this site: The Atari Age. The scans I used for this blog come from this site.