Hey look, we are finally getting to the games that are pretty alright and don’t need a ton of qualifications before you can sort of recommend them to people under 50.
Like a lot of these early launch Atari titles, Indy 500 is an amalgamation of some of Atari’s arcade racers which they thought were necessary to help them stand out from all the other pong boxes on the market and it worked! For a while this was the high water mark of console racing games and honestly for all its simplicity it holds up, I mean its not any more simplistic than most mobile racing games when you think about it.
As is standard, there are a few slightly different game modes here to and a couple different tracks - including the treacherous and amusingly nicknamed DEVIL’S ELBOW - and all of them are pretty fun as well if not entirely drastically different from each other. While I’ve never gotten a chance to mess around with this one with the original driving paddle jawn, the controls are still shockingly responsive for this old of a game. There is a game mode where you race but on ice and your car actually slides around, but not in the frustrating icy surface way that would come to plague platformers and such going forward. There is also a demolition derby-ish mode and a tag mode which are all just different enough to add give things a good variation. Overall just a really solid racing game from 43 god damn years ago.
Like a lot of these early launch Atari titles, Indy 500 is an amalgamation of some of Atari’s arcade racers which they thought were necessary to help them stand out from all the other pong boxes on the market and it worked! For a while this was the high water mark of console racing games and honestly for all its simplicity it holds up, I mean its not any more simplistic than most mobile racing games when you think about it.
As is standard, there are a few slightly different game modes here to and a couple different tracks - including the treacherous and amusingly nicknamed DEVIL’S ELBOW - and all of them are pretty fun as well if not entirely drastically different from each other. While I’ve never gotten a chance to mess around with this one with the original driving paddle jawn, the controls are still shockingly responsive for this old of a game. There is a game mode where you race but on ice and your car actually slides around, but not in the frustrating icy surface way that would come to plague platformers and such going forward. There is also a demolition derby-ish mode and a tag mode which are all just different enough to add give things a good variation. Overall just a really solid racing game from 43 god damn years ago.