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by Lore Sjöberg
Adventure
You're a dot. You have an arrow, which is actually a sword,
which you use to kill what appear to be giant ducks. Giant, at least,
compared to you, but you're a dot, so it's hard to figure scale.
This is what passed for epic on the 2600. Aside from the arrow/duck
thing, you also have to avoid a bat and collect keys to get
into a castle to find the magic chalice. Playing this game today,
one of the odd things is the lack of theme music. Any self-respecting
fantasy adventure these days has mind-numbingly repetitive theme
music. Except for the occasional beep, Adventure takes place in
grim silence, like a low-res German Realist film. B+
Breakout
It's no coincidence, I think, that video games started to really
take off when they could be played solo. The first couple of
games, like Pong, were two-player affairs. But really, people
who actually have friends and a social life are the wrong
demographic to target. Once they started to aim for the
losers-with-disposable-income set, the quarters started to
flow freely. Breakout, then, is basically solitaire Pong.
You're not breaking out of anything; you're staying in one place,
pretending to destroy the walls that hold you in, only to give up
the freedom you've painstakingly won for another set of walls,
preferring a Sisyphian pseudo-challenge to true social and emotional
evolution. Sad metaphor, pretty neat game. C+
Pac-Man
This was the great Atari 2600 betrayal. The hype surrounding this
release was tremendous, fueled of course by the huge success of the
arcade game. And when the cartridge was finally released, sliding
it into the game console was like slipping a stiletto into your
own back. The game was pitiful. Pac-Man was shaped like a video
Wheat Thin, and instead of making cheerful munching sounds, he
honked. The ghosts were blocky and flickery, and the colorful
fruit had been replaced by a square "vitamin." Pathetic. D-
Pitfall
This may have been the biggest success of the whole drawn-out 2600
saga, as evidenced by the fact that survived its humble beginnings
and lead to Pitfall II, Super Pitfall, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure,
Pitfall 3-D, Pit-Tris, Pitfall Kombat, Pitfall in Pink: Barbie's Jungle
Shopping Quest, and the short-lived "Pitfall!" Saturday morning
cartoon show (1984-85). Not bad for a game where the high point is standing
on alligator noses. Certainly this was head and fedora above most
of what else was being offered at the time, and it was kind of fun,
but it didn't really have a big ending. You just collected all
the treasures and it was over. No accolades, no drawn-out credit
sequences, just no more game. B-
Superman
The first of about four hundred billion video games starring
the Man of Steel, this took a lot of liberties with the
Superman mythos. For instance, Superman was bald, and looked and sounded like
a large wasp. Also, Kryptonite could, inexplicably, be counteracted by a kiss from Lois
Lane, who was only too willing to supply the needed antidote and would keep
on necking with you interminably if you picked her up. This was a basic
low-key gather-some-things-and-avoid-other-things game of the sort that
was mildly popular before computer resolution was high enough to accurately
render arterial spray, but I liked it. B
Combat
This is the game they handed out with the 2600, and it was
pretty tedious, It provided three challenges: shoot dots at each
other in biplanes, shoot dots at each other in tanks, and
shoot dots at each other in jets. Still, you've got to give
them credit for being the only home video game to date
with an instruction manual that incorporates the phrase
"Invisible Tank Pong." D
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