Recommend me Atari 2600 games!

If you don't know what the symbols are, the video doesn't make much sense. The instruction book gave a pretty good idea of what to do. The black market, secret passages. What a game

Running Man wrote:

If you don't know what the symbols are, the video doesn't make much sense. It's been decades, but I think the instruction book gave a pretty good idea of what to do. The black market, secret passages. What a game :)

That's part of what I loved about that game. I remember bring like 9 and my best friend and I talking about how stuff worked, when the hidden passages showed up, how to find the location of the Ark. It was a months long discussion and back and forth before someone finally completed it.

My brothers and I played that game so many many times. Even I don't know what's going on in that video any more.

Edit: Okay, most of it I do.

Enduro
Chopper Command
River Raid

Chopper Command was the only game I ever played that I got to 999,999. I loved that game.

Oh, Star Master!

IMAGE(http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa237/dbrent19/s_CustersRevenge_1.png)
No love for Custer's Revenge?

Yet another vote for Yar's Revenge. Best game on the 2600.

My sister and I spent many, MANY hours playing Maze Craze multiplayer.

Don't be too disappointed by the lousy graphics on that old console. It was an incredibly primitive piece of hardware. It didn't even have a frame buffer; it had just 128 bytes of RAM, and the CPU literally had to race the CRT's scanline down the screen, drawing the pixels just before the beam crossed them. More modern 2D consoles have enough RAM to represent at least two pages of screen data, so the processor can be drawing in a second buffer while the first one displays, and then flip them during the vertical blank. But on the 2600, it was all being generated pixel by pixel just before getting lit up by the TV.

More details here; among other things, I learned that Pitfall's swinging vine is actually the ball graphic from Pong, redrawn over and over again as the raster beam traveled downward.

Oh, Pitfall's good, too.

Decathlon . My neighbor and I probably destroyed 4-5 of his joysticks playing this game.

Also good 'ole Missile Command. Stayed up all night once, passing the joystick back and forth seeing how far we could go until we either lost of fell asleep.

MacBrave wrote:

Decathlon . My neighbor and I probably destroyed 4-5 of his joysticks playing this game.

My brother and I went also through a few joysticks playing that. To shave a few fractions of a second off our times, we ended up taking apart our joysticks and swapping out parts to find the best combination of circuit board and plastic stick. We also figured out that we could improve our times on the games where you have to run by playing with the rubber cover off, and put the tip of your finger in the hole at the top of the stick, allowing you to wiggle it back and forth faster.

tl;dr - take off the rubber and insert your fingertip in the hole so that you can wiggle your stick faster

MacBrave wrote:

Decathlon . My neighbor and I probably destroyed 4-5 of his joysticks playing this game.

I had it up above, but thirded for awesomeness. Since we're sharing Decathlon stories, I'd share that I had figured out some weird sequence of joystick moves that let me pretty much fly like Superman on the pole vault. Eventually, the bar was off the screen, and I was still clearing it.

Played Decathlon on the Atari 800. First time we did the 1500m run we were sweating and exhausted.

Allright boys, some lost gems:

Atari Video Cube
Circus Atari
Haunted House
Pele's Soccer
Surround
Adventures Of Tron
Atlantis
Bump N Jump
Tron Deadly Disks
Dark Cavern
Demon Attack
Fathom
Riddle Of The Sphinx
Firefighter
Frogger
London Blitz
Mountain King
Pooyan
Private Eye
Pressure Cooker
River Raid
Solar Fox
Spider Man
All of the Star Wars games are good
And yes, the classics most of which have been mentioned above, basically almost any cartridge by Imagic or Activision is a winner.
And even narrowing this list down there are some amazing games for what the hardware could do, Fathom and Pitfall 2 in particular. Happy hunting!!!