Berzerk - Atari 2600/VCS

This is a port of a popular arcade game released in 1980, and is actually one of the first video games with speech synthesis! Unfortunately that's missing from the 2600 version, but they didn't have the fancy new AtariVox device from AtariAge in the 1980s, so I can't blame them.

This is one of my favourite games to play on my VCS, in the dark, on a CRT blasting my eyes out. The sounds and rather minimalistic but popping graphics really appeal to me.

The story is simple. You're part of a group of guys who made a very huge mistake in deciding to explore a planet made entirely of walls that kill you and evil robots called Automazeons (the name presumably means robots that automatically complete mazes, but they do kind of the opposite of that in game.) Also, there's an evil emoji who will feast on your remains. The story basically tells you that escape is impossible and you're going to die. Lovely.

The gameplay is what matters with a game like this, though. You must venture through endless mazes, the walls of which are deadly, and the robots are even deadlier. You can fire a lazer in the direction you're moving, but you can only have one on screen at once (firing is instant so if you like you can walk right up to a wall and continue firing, which will create a constant sine wave as you are firing your lazer 999999999 times a second.)

After a short while in one maze, Evil Otto will appear and begin bouncing towards you. This is the world's most intimidating smily face, and on some game modes cannot be killed. You die in one hit of course, from basically anything (you're a very fragile little stick man!)

Depending on game modes, you'll get an extra life every certain amount of points, or not at all.

My favourite thing about this game is that there are 12 game modes to choose from. They only offer minimal changes but are always welcome on these cartridges. I like to play on the hardest one, which offers no new extra lives, and Evil Otto is invincible. I can only get around 4000 points on this, whereas on game mode 1, my high score is around 21,200.

I 100% recommend this game, as it is a blast to play, addicting, offers variance in challenge and is obviously best on original hardware with the original atari VCS joystick.