Top 10 Worst Games on the 2600 (In my Opinion)

[BIGHMW]

4 hours ago, zzip said:

I don't know either, but Atari started shipping 8K carts not long after Pacman released, and if there was any game that should have had 8K, it was Pacman because it was such a high-profile title! 

Guys, here is one of my early episodes of the 2600 Edition of The Atari Report, and I had some not so nice things to say in retrospect to when I was younger back then who looked forward to it, about the original 1981 Atari Pac-Man port, then later on, I reviewed Dennis Debro's brilliant Pac-Man 4K, in which came out in 2007, in which much like Todd Frye's earlier try from 1981, also only used 4K of memory, if Todd Frye was not rushed by the powers that be at Warner and Atari to get it out in time for the holidays back in 1981 it could've been better or even like that of Dennis Debro's more brilliant version.

 

 

 

 

I included the ROMs of them, as well as one someone did of Pac-Man 4K with the in-between maze intermissions added in, and, also a version from a French company called Ebivision from 1999 in which also came out as well.

PacMan.bin PacMan4K.bin Pacman4KIntermission.bin PacManEbivision.bin

[BIGHMW]

Here is Ebivision's version of Pac-Man from 1999 for the 2600, you can find the download on the previous post.

 

 

[zzip]

13 hours ago, CapitanClassic said:

Yeah, but if the difference in cost is $1, then you just saved Atari Corp. $27 million, and earned yourself a huge bonus.

God bless the bean-counters.

Well that is how Atari operated.    A better-run videogame company like a Sony or Nintendo would've recognized that a game like Pac-man was an important asset and could help the company maintain it's dominance and therefore the game needed to shine.   But Atari was so short-sighted they cheaped out on one of there most important titles.

[zzip]

10 hours ago, BIGHMW said:

Guys, here is one of my early episodes of the 2600 Edition of The Atari Report, and I had some not so nice things to say in retrospect to when I was younger back then who looked forward to it, about the original 1981 Atari Pac-Man port, then later on, I reviewed Dennis Debro's brilliant Pac-Man 4K, in which came out in 2007, in which much like Todd Frye's earlier try from 1981, also only used 4K of memory, if Todd Frye was not rushed by the powers that be at Warner and Atari to get it out in time for the holidays back in 1981 it could've been better or even like that of Dennis Debro's more brilliant version.

 

 

 

 

I included the ROMs of them, as well as one someone did of Pac-Man 4K with the in-between maze intermissions added in, and, also a version from a French company called Ebivision from 1999 in which also came out as well.

PacMan.bin 4 kB · 1 download PacMan4K.bin 4 kB · 1 download Pacman4KIntermission.bin 4 kB · 1 download PacManEbivision.bin 4 kB · 1 download

Definitely 4K isn't the only problem with the port.   Here's a few fixes that could have been made to the game without increasing memory requirements

1. fix maze colors

2. Pacman has no eye, get rid of it! and make the pacman sprite rounder

3. door on sides, not top

 

Then there's the sounds, maze shapes, lack of up/down animation, insane amount of ghost flicker, weird sounds, and pellets instead of fruit that might have required more rom space to fix.   Just because one programmer can stuff most of that into 4K doesn't mean every programmer could.   Also some comments Todd Frye made made it seem like he didn't really understand the appeal of the game, and thought his version was fine.   Even with 8K he might not have been the right person for the job.

 

 

[+KaeruYojimbo]

13 hours ago, BIGHMW said:

Guys, here is one of my early episodes of the 2600 Edition of The Atari Report, and I had some not so nice things to say in retrospect to when I was younger back then who looked forward to it, about the original 1981 Atari Pac-Man port, then later on, I reviewed Dennis Debro's brilliant Pac-Man 4K, in which came out in 2007, in which much like Todd Frye's earlier try from 1981, also only used 4K of memory, if Todd Frye was not rushed by the powers that be at Warner and Atari to get it out in time for the holidays back in 1981 it could've been better or even like that of Dennis Debro's more brilliant version.

 

Even given all the time he could have wanted (Pac-Man was released in the spring of '82, so there wasn't a holiday rush, but there was still a deadline to get it done), Tod Frye wouldn't have made anything close to Dennis Debro's version. Sometimes people get hung up on the 4K and forget about everything else. In addition to what zzip said, Pac-Man 4K takes advantage of an extra 25 years of figuring out how to get the most out of the 2600 hardware. At best we might have gotten something closer to the 2600 port of Ms. Pac-Man, and even that might be a stretch.

[BIGHMW]

Yeah but Ms. Pac-Man utilized 8K of ROM, more than double that of the two ports I featured and yes, I also did a review on Ms. as well, it's a good thing you brought her up, so here is that review for you  :

 

 

[zzip]

3 hours ago, KaeruYojimbo said:

 

Even given all the time he could have wanted (Pac-Man was released in the spring of '82, so there wasn't a holiday rush, but there was still a deadline to get it done), Tod Frye wouldn't have made anything close to Dennis Debro's version. Sometimes people get hung up on the 4K and forget about everything else. In addition to what zzip said, Pac-Man 4K takes advantage of an extra 25 years of figuring out how to get the most out of the 2600 hardware. At best we might have gotten something closer to the 2600 port of Ms. Pac-Man, and even that might be a stretch.

Not to mention the much better development tools we have.   I have no idea what they originally developed 2600 carts on, but I assume it was primative compared to the assemblers we have today, not to mention being able to test instantly via emulation.   That can save a lot of time and speed up development.  Also a lot of homebrews benefit from modern graphics tools

[+KaeruYojimbo]

On 11/27/2020 at 9:56 AM, BIGHMW said:

Yeah but Ms. Pac-Man utilized 8K of ROM, more than double that of the two ports I featured

 

I'm aware of that. I wasn't saying Tod Frye could've made Ms. Pac-Man in 4k. My point was simply that the best case scenario in 1982 would have been a game that looked a lot more like the Ms. Pac-Man port than Dennis Debro's, which would have been impossible at the time. It's pretty cool that it's now possible to do things in 4K that couldn't be done in 8K in the 80's.

[+wongojack]

On 11/26/2020 at 2:04 PM, schuwalker said:

Parker Brothers' James Bond is not going to win awards on gameplay, and it surpasses some of the games mentioned , but I just loathe this game. Even as a kid - I hated this game. I think I was more pissed because I got this mess instead of that cool ad where Roger Moore is traversing on top of a train.

You are definitely on to something here.  You'll be happy to know that on the 5200 (a platform with no shovelware) that this game IS the absolute worst.  At least that's my opinion.  I don't think the game is any fun on a single platform.  I've said before - it is like "a turd covered version of Moon Patrol."

[gambler172]

Donkey Kong was really big sh....too expansive and really bad.

Pac Kong also shit.

 

[insertclevernamehere]

9 hours ago, wongojack said:

You are definitely on to something here.  You'll be happy to know that on the 5200 (a platform with no shovelware) that this game IS the absolute worst.  At least that's my opinion.  I don't think the game is any fun on a single platform.  I've said before - it is like "a turd covered version of Moon Patrol."

What is it with Parker Bros?  You knew where you were with most publishers.  They either did mostly good games with an occasional duff one or they were mostly bad with the occasional good one.  Sometimes you got publishers where ALL their games were good or all were bad.  But with Parker Bros, it could swing either way.  You had about a 50/50 chance of the game turning out good or total garbage.  I don't think any other publisher was quite so regularly inconsistent in the quality department as them.

[zzip]

21 minutes ago, insertclevernamehere said:

What is it with Parker Bros?  You knew where you were with most publishers.  They either did mostly good games with an occasional duff one or they were mostly bad with the occasional good one.  Sometimes you got publishers where ALL their games were good or all were bad.  But with Parker Bros, it could swing either way.  You had about a 50/50 chance of the game turning out good or total garbage.  I don't think any other publisher was quite so regularly inconsistent in the quality department as them.

I remember they were quite aggressive in their marketing between 82-84 and had lots of high-profile games.   This probably meant tight deadlines in getting releases to production, and that sometimes means rush jobs.   Did they have an in-house programming team or contract out?

 

I don't really remember a lot of bad games from them though.   I didn't play them all, but generally their arcade ports were good.  ESB was kind of weak, but not terrible.   I admit I never tried the James Bond game.

[DoctorSpuds]

26 minutes ago, insertclevernamehere said:

What is it with Parker Bros?  You knew where you were with most publishers.  They either did mostly good games with an occasional duff one or they were mostly bad with the occasional good one.  Sometimes you got publishers where ALL their games were good or all were bad.  But with Parker Bros, it could swing either way.  You had about a 50/50 chance of the game turning out good or total garbage.  I don't think any other publisher was quite so regularly inconsistent in the quality department as them.

I think it was usually a case of biting off more than they could chew. If you look at their game library they probably have one of the most ambitious lineups on the system with a huge amount of arcade conversions and licensed IP's. We all know that the 2600 is spotty at best when it comes to quality arcade conversions and that spottiness hits Parker Bros pretty hard. I'd say the simple fact that they managed to get those games working on the system is impressive enough even if a good chunk of them are subpar.

[+wongojack]

I think of them as mostly good, but I'm probably forgetting a few.  What are the other bad ones?

30 minutes ago, insertclevernamehere said:

What is it with Parker Bros?  You knew where you were with most publishers.  They either did mostly good games with an occasional duff one or they were mostly bad with the occasional good one.  Sometimes you got publishers where ALL their games were good or all were bad.  But with Parker Bros, it could swing either way.  You had about a 50/50 chance of the game turning out good or total garbage.  I don't think any other publisher was quite so regularly inconsistent in the quality department as them.

 

[insertclevernamehere]

19 minutes ago, wongojack said:

I think of them as mostly good, but I'm probably forgetting a few.  What are the other bad ones?

 

Sky Skipper, GI Joe, Tutankham, Super Cobra, SW Jedi Arena and Reactor.

[zzip]

25 minutes ago, wongojack said:

I think of them as mostly good, but I'm probably forgetting a few.  What are the other bad ones?

 

To be honest, when I think of their arcade ports, I think of what they've done across various systems and they've done some decent ports.   But if I limit it to just the 2600 ports..  yeah, some are kind of weak.  I mean a game like Popeye, there's only so much a 2600 can do with that.   But Frogger was a bit meh.   Starpath showed that it could be done better, but I think the Supercharger had more memory to work with too?

[high voltage]

On 7/13/2020 at 4:49 PM, davyK said:

Custer's Revenge has to be in folks' top 10. There's the subject matter to start with. That alone. But the horrific implementation consisting of gameplay with next to zero skill and no variety. Horrific sounds as well. 

 

A few UK folk mentioned tape above. That era almost put me off videogaming for good. I have very little in the way of happy memories of it. I was 16 in 1982. In the mid-80s I went from the 2600 to the 8bit micro era which was a car crash as far I was concerned. The immediacy was removed. The video circuitry was cheap and gave you a crap image on the TV.

 

While it was a great nursery for fledgling talent the vast majority of the games were shit. They looked like shit. They sounded like shit. The design was shit. The frame rates were shit. The jerky movement and animation was shit. The overall implementation was shit. Difficulty curves were all over the place. They were slow, unresponsive trash even compared to mid-tier 2600 games that made up for their relative simplicity with their craftmanship. Going from masterpieces of game design in the arcade to this trash simply didn't cut the mustard.

 

There are a handful of games worth even looking at now.....Thrust, Jet Set Willy, Chuckie Egg would be 3 that would be still playable today. Boulderdash would be another.  I got a fair few hours of pleasure out of the micro era but the compromises were too much. Too many games were simply too ambitious for the platforms - the ultimate sin being multi load games.  I still remember the pain of Epyx and their multi-event sports games. Bloody awful.

 

The devs were cutting their teeth and learning their trade. And most of what they made should have stayed on the workshop floor. Hideous time. If I had been able to afford an Atari 800 and carts or a BBC-B and a hard drive I may have thought better of it. But I didn't.

 

Tape loading was bad enough but to have to rewind and load again if you got a game over in New Zealand Story was inexcusable. I binned that hardware without a tear when I got a NES. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I got more fun out of coding simple stuff myself and even taught myself a bit of assembler but I didn't have the drive to create anything worthy of playing. It's a pity a lot more people didn't think the same.

 

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I still play 2600 games today - emulated and on real hardware. Spectrum? C64? CPC464? Give me a break. I briefly looked at the emulators - it was even worse than I remembered even with the loadtimes removed.

 

F**k it all in the bin.  Rant over.

 

 

Except cheap tape games from companies like Mastertronic, Players and wotnot, I always purchased the disk version when buying games for my C64 and A8. Mind you, C64 disk loading was still slow when loading from disk drive. WHSmith, computer shops, Woolies and others always sold both, tape and disk.

[insertclevernamehere]

On 7/13/2020 at 10:49 AM, davyK said:

Custer's Revenge has to be in folks' top 10. There's the subject matter to start with. That alone. But the horrific implementation consisting of gameplay with next to zero skill and no variety. Horrific sounds as well. 

 

A few UK folk mentioned tape above. That era almost put me off videogaming for good. I have very little in the way of happy memories of it. I was 16 in 1982. In the mid-80s I went from the 2600 to the 8bit micro era which was a car crash as far I was concerned. The immediacy was removed. The video circuitry was cheap and gave you a crap image on the TV.

 

While it was a great nursery for fledgling talent the vast majority of the games were shit. They looked like shit. They sounded like shit. The design was shit. The frame rates were shit. The jerky movement and animation was shit. The overall implementation was shit. Difficulty curves were all over the place. They were slow, unresponsive trash even compared to mid-tier 2600 games that made up for their relative simplicity with their craftmanship. Going from masterpieces of game design in the arcade to this trash simply didn't cut the mustard.

 

There are a handful of games worth even looking at now.....Thrust, Jet Set Willy, Chuckie Egg would be 3 that would be still playable today. Boulderdash would be another.  I got a fair few hours of pleasure out of the micro era but the compromises were too much. Too many games were simply too ambitious for the platforms - the ultimate sin being multi load games.  I still remember the pain of Epyx and their multi-event sports games. Bloody awful.

 

The devs were cutting their teeth and learning their trade. And most of what they made should have stayed on the workshop floor. Hideous time. If I had been able to afford an Atari 800 and carts or a BBC-B and a hard drive I may have thought better of it. But I didn't.

 

Tape loading was bad enough but to have to rewind and load again if you got a game over in New Zealand Story was inexcusable. I binned that hardware without a tear when I got a NES. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I got more fun out of coding simple stuff myself and even taught myself a bit of assembler but I didn't have the drive to create anything worthy of playing. It's a pity a lot more people didn't think the same.

 

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I still play 2600 games today - emulated and on real hardware. Spectrum? C64? CPC464? Give me a break. I briefly looked at the emulators - it was even worse than I remembered even with the loadtimes removed.

 

F**k it all in the bin.  Rant over.

 

 

So what pooters did you have back in the day?  I had a Spectrum after my VCS/2600 and then a C64.  While I have next to no nostalgia for the Speccie or C64 and loads of nostalgia for the 2600, as well as regret for getting a 2600 too late and replacing it with a Spectrum after too short a time with it, I don't have quite the animosity towards them that you seem to have.  The thing I found the most unsatisfying about the Spectrum was the lacklustre sound.  While some 2600 games can be a bit sonically minimalist, the machine makes such wonderful, synthy sounds.  And they come through the tv so you could crank up the volume a bit.  The spectrum made such boring bleeps and bloops and only came through a tinny, tiny speaker on the pooter itself.  Yawn. For me, sound is possibly more important than graphics and for mostly that reason, I have fonder memories of my 2600.
 

 The C64 had superior graphics and sound that was at least on a par with my beloved VCS but by then, I think my parents were getting a little fed up with me chopping and changing machines and so I only got a cassette player.  I could afford more games getting them on cassette vs disc anyway and was kind of used to the load times.  But after a while, probably a week after the warranty ran out, the notoriously bad reliability of the cassette player struck and I won't go into the details of the shit I went through with that.  Suffice to say, for that reason, I have next to zero nostalgia for that pooter either.  Which is why these days, I'm all about the consoles and mostly my beloved 2600 woody.  All hail the 2600!  The greatest games machine of all time!

[retroeight]

On 4/15/2020 at 1:21 PM, Atariperson23 said:

10: Basic Math

Do you know why Gary Palmer never worked on another game for the 2600? This is why. Basic Math is boring, boring and boring. It's about as fun as practicing flashcards. Not much to say about this primitive torture device. NEXT!

9: Donkey Kong

Everyone, here's the worst arcade port in all the 2600 arcade ports (which was a lot) Coleco produced a lot of trash for the 2600, but Donkey Kong is on a new level. Donkey Kong? Gingerbread man. Levels? 2. Paulina? Yellow-headed and wearing a blue dress with white sleeves. Considering Garry Kitchen (who cooked up Pressure Cooker) made this, this makes Donkey Kong frustrating and disappointing, especially considering the publicity surrounding the arcade port in 1982. Yes, I know they couldn't have done a perfect port, but this feels like Coleco was just lazy.

8: SwordQuest: FireWorld

This game was made by Atari. Not Apollo, nor Froggo, nor Zimag, but the company that started it all: Atari. And I don't like it at all! The graphics will make your eyes bleed (Your character is a lovely shade of black, with a cross sticking out, the dragons are birds, the snakes are worms, the bird sprite in a challenge looks like a sorcerer...) And there are a lot of bugs and glitches in-game, including the warp factor, losing a life automatically at the beginning of the bat mini game... This is no doubt the worst game in the SwordQuest series.

7: Fire Fly

Oh No! Mythicon!!!!!! Mythicon has come to invade the world with bad games and music! But to be honest, Sorcerer has a strong and haunting tune played to it that'll make you want more of it, as well as added levels and challenge. Star Fox at least tries to do something different with the Defender formula. Fire Fly meanwhile makes no sense whatsoever, the difficulty never ramps up, the music is awful, the graphics are blocky and one-dimensional... This game is just horrible, ouch.

6: Space Jockey

Yawn... Not only does Space Jockey possess annoying sound effects, monotonous gameplay, and bland graphics (All you'll see is your spaceship, a house, a tank, a hot-air balloon, a helicopter, a tree, and the one-colored ground) you'll also have... NO LEVELS!!! How absolutely exciting! I can't wait to play Space Jockey for five hours! (Yes, that was definitely sarcasm) 

5: Sssnake

Get a Centipede cartridge. Now flip it 180 degrees. Now make everything the same color, except for a bunch of brown squares. Now make the control really bad, and make the snake/centipede invincible. Now make the score roll over at the high score of 99 and you have Sssnake. Sssnake is unoriginal and as fun as watching decomposing corpses, only worse. Not only that, the game freezes some times. Enjoy.

4: Double Dragon

People love to defend Double Dragon. They say it's the best Activision could've done. Wrong. This is a game released by the same company that brought us the legendary classics Pitfall II and River Raid, and a company that had 16K to work with (Normally, 8K would be enough for Activision to "work their magic") and twelve years of programming breakthroughs and expertise. So Activision has zero excuses of making a bad port- especially in 1989! Klax and Secret Quest were also made in 1989, also with 16K, and were they as bad as this disposable piece of- of... ?!

3: Dishaster

This game is endlessly repetitive. The score is pre-determined, so you can't really have any strategy to improve your score, the graphics are lowly-defined circus tents, a lot of purple, a girl that looks like a blob, and plates that look somewhat reminiscent of marbles. The music is eight measures, and will cause you to fall asleep. The game is very slow-paced, and dropping a plate takes too long. Not only that, it's a waste of your time. No wonder Zimag didn't last all that long.

2: Karate

In Karate, you will embrace the world of... diaper-wearing ameoba slime! Not only that, take poor collision detection, compromised and slow controls, gameplay that repeats itself over and over again... Volia, Karate. Why is this Number 2? Because it's utterly unplayable. In one-player, you'll hit the enemy AI one every five or six times, while he'll be perfect. Also, the worse you are, the harder the game is! This one deserves to get a good beating.

1: Merlin's Walls

Ladies and gentlemen... the worst game of all time. Can you believe this was made in 1999? Yeah, neither can I. You have to rotate your TV 90 degrees just to play the game, which makes the game convoluted enough. Add horrid graphics and weird controls and you get this unplayable piece of schmuck. This game has 3D mazes, but so does Tunnel Runner, and it's not this bad. FAIL!

 

What do you think? Am I right or wrong?

 

I still say and will continue to say the worst Atari game was Basic programming.... Way more terrible than Basic math.

[keithbk]

I loved Donkey Kong when I was younger. I never played it at the arcade, so I knew nothing about a "3rd level." It was fun.

 

I think I stopped playing Atari completely when I got my C64. I spent countless hours working my way through the Zork games, playing Defender of the Crown, Impossible Mission, or even the James Bond game for that system. And then writing your own games became a fun challenge in BASIC programming. I know I had a cartridge game or two for the C64, but I cannot remember them. The Infocom games were fabulous, then Might and Magic and the Gold Box Dungeons and Dragons (Pool of Radiance, Krynn, etc) games came out and I played them endlessly.

 

I never got into Nintendo. A couple of guys told me all about Legend of Zelda and invited me to play. I played for a bit and was like, "Meh, I could make this on Adventure Construction Set on my C64."

[7800Knight]

 

I still say that the Atari 2600 port of Congo Bongo deserves to be on the top 10 worst games list.

 

Ugh...those ugly blocky graphics!  I said it before and I'll say it again: the Atari 2600 can't handle isometric perspective.

[+Karl G]

On 12/9/2020 at 10:44 AM, retroeight said:

I still say and will continue to say the worst Atari game was Basic programming.... Way more terrible than Basic math.

Bah. Given the constraints of 4K ROM, the inout method, and needing to share the tiny amount of RAM between the interpreter and the programs created, I would say that what he produced was pretty incredible. And it was also kind of fun if you didn't have a real computer on which to create programs.

[7800Knight]

On 12/9/2020 at 9:44 AM, retroeight said:

I still say and will continue to say the worst Atari game was Basic programming.... Way more terrible than Basic math.

Speaking of Basic Programming, was there ever any truth to that urban legend about how this cartridge came about because customers protested?  Supposedly, the console was called the "Video Computer System" and computers are supposed to be programmable so this cartridge was made to make people think they could turn their Atari console into a full-blown computer.

[christo930]

On 11/26/2020 at 2:17 PM, Steverd said:

 

I wonder what the cost difference was between the 4K and 8K to make back in 1982?

Was it really that much different?

 

I don't know the exact cost, but most likely very little.  It might have cost more because they weren't using them. IOW, they might have had pricing that involved multiple games (minimum order over the course of a year) and that to use an 8k ROM cost more simply because they couldn't buy it in bulk. The packaging and shipping were probably more.

In retrospect, it's not like the 4k version hurt them. DK is one of the most common carts.

On 11/26/2020 at 4:44 PM, insertclevernamehere said:

7. Pressure Cooker.  I just can't get a handle on this game and it's not much more fun than working in a fast food restaurant for real.  That's just an assumption though.  I've never actually worked in one, thankfully.

 

.

Count your lucky blessings. I worked in a fast food joint for one shift when I was in college.  Walked out in the middle of the shift. Worst job ever.

[christo930]

On 11/30/2020 at 1:24 PM, zzip said:

To be honest, when I think of their arcade ports, I think of what they've done across various systems and they've done some decent ports.   But if I limit it to just the 2600 ports..  yeah, some are kind of weak.  I mean a game like Popeye, there's only so much a 2600 can do with that.   But Frogger was a bit meh.   Starpath showed that it could be done better, but I think the Supercharger had more memory to work with too?

Wasn't there RAM expansions by the time Frogger came out?  IIRC, Omega Race had 256 bytes built into the cart (RAM Plus). 

They were, as mentioned pretty hit and miss.  If RAM was an issue, they should have made a RAM cart. They were putting out a lot of games to spread the costs around.  For me the missing sound always took away from the PB version.  I always liked the Frogger tunes.