Star Raiders
Atari 26001982
Star Raiders is one of the very earliest first person space dogfighting games, and the intriguing thing about it is that they came up with a novel gimmick of packaging it with a pad of buttons that you plug into the second controller slot. By today’s seventeen-button standard, this raft of additional buttons may not be much, but when you are used to nothing but games that only use one button, the Video Touch Pad is a orgy of button-pressing decadence.
This game sounds sooo cool in that I was in a Star Trek Fan Club in high school sort of way. With the Video Touch Pad, not only can you can toggle your shields and targeting computer on and off, but you can enter hyperspace to outmaneuver the raiders you are fighting. That an assload of button pressing!! Unfortunately, the 2600 lacks the horsepower to really do much with these concepts, and the gameplay ultimately lacks any real variety. To compensate for these deficiencies, when I played it, I just pretended I was playing a good game!
But sadly, without the power of pretending, one is forced to admit that the game is crap. All the button-pressing just added a layer of annoyance on a shoddy game. Still, the game was had a reach that dared exceed its grasp, and that’s why I kinda love it.
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