This is a decently fun one. I enjoyed it more than Strip-Off, which was the other Tactical Neuronics homebrew on the Atari Flashback.

It has the same shoot-up style layout as Space Invaders (whatever that genre is called). However it's actually more similar to Yar's Revenge; there's only one enemy instead of a horde, and it's shooting back at you both with regular lasers and with timed bombs. Also like Yar, the enemy is protected by a moving shield that you have to chip away at to create an opening. The movement of the shield and the unpredictable movements of the enemy lead to some frantic and dynamic gameplay.

On top of that, there's a score meter that fills up not only when you hit the enemy (ending the level and moving on to the next one), but also when you break a block of the shield. So you're actually incentivized to leave the enemy alive while you destroy the entire shield for maximum points, and it becomes increasingly difficult both to avoid being shot and to avoid shooting the enemy.

All-in-all a very tightly packed and neatly designed game. The most impressive part to me is that it achieves everything without any lag or screen flickering. A testament both to the developer's skill and to having 30+ years of hindsight on a console's lifespan.

It's a pretty decent soccer game for the 2600, I remember enjoying it quite a bit when I was a kid. This game's solution to the problem of controlling multiple players is that you move 3 players around in a locked triangle formation. This can be pretty janky but it leads to some strategic play.

I'm impressed by how modular and customizable each gameplay element is. With a matrix of 40 gamemodes you can adjust the time limit, size of the goal, CPU skill level, and all sorts of other stuff. I didn't have time to play all of them but the one I picked felt pretty balanced.

International Soccer is still my favorite of the 3 Atari soccer games I've played, but this was a solid early attempt. It understands its limitations and delivers the best it can within those limits. I think I like it better than RealSports Soccer.

here's a fact i bet u never heard before. did you know that... tame impala... is just one guy...?

Adventure is a horror game. Those fucking duck dragons have filled me with existential dread since I was 6 years old. Moving thru walls as they please. Flickering in the corner of your eye for a moment before disappearing like some creepypasta bullshit. And then one eats you, and that's it. No GAME OVER text, no flashy effects or sounds. You just sit there in its translucent stomach pushing at the sides to no avail even though you already know. Unrelated, but have you watched Nope? It's a great movie.

Terror aside, Adventure is still very fun to navigate through. Its simple formula of labyrinths and items is so beautifully streamlined and creates so many interesting moment-to-moment scenarios that I'm surprised Atari didn't try to make 50 more of these. There's no need to hook up a second controller to manage your inventory, if you see an item just pick it up, and put it down when you're done with it. And thanks to clear, iconic sprites and well-thought environmental placement, you can intuit the purpose of every item the game throws at you without having to check the manual. It doesn't sound that impressive talking about it now but it surprises me how many Atari games in the years following seem to have evolved backwards from this 1979 prometheus.

Everyone say thank u Warren Robinett. He brought a golden chalice into the castle of video game development (and his name into a secret room), refused to elaborate and left. And he's just one guy.

For some reason on my Flashback 6, when I'm holding the sword the dragons run away from me. I don't remember that ever being a thing, and in all of the gameplay videos I've watched that never happens. Is my game cursed??

the 2600 thrives on simple games like this, not overly ambitious sportsball attempts. The core gameplay is extremely straightforward, but fun enough that it survives to this day in games like slither.io, and some gameplay variants spice it up. There's even a little drawing minigame, which has some novelty even in its primitive state.

The decision for singleplayer to be controlled with the right controller jack is an odd one, but I guess this is before the whole left-to-right shorthand became canonized in video game vocabulary.