39. Star Raiders

Star Raiders

Atari 2600
1982

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.

Star Raiders

Atari 2600
Released 1982

This game is too complex for it's own good.
It requires you to use a secondary keypad controller with a plastic overlay, but most of the time you never actually make it to that point in the game.
It's apparently some sort of real-time strategy game mixed with space combat, but the 2600 was quite obviously incapable of pulling it off. From what I gather from the manual, you first must fight off a wave of enemies before you can access the star map. Fighting off enemies is a first person affair where you can slightly alter your flight path and try to get enemies into the cross-hairs. After you destroy the enemies, you computer will let you know that the area is clear, after which you need to bring up the star map and locate other enemy groups. The enemy groups will be trying to destroy your bases, and you must stop them by warping to them and entering the first person space combat game again.
The actual space combat is practically unplayable. I can only recall once as a child actually seeing the star map, and that was when an adult was playing. Even now, at 26, I couldn't get past the awful shooting stage.
This game is bad.