I have a confession to make up front here: I am not, generally speaking, an Atari Guy.

I've played plenty of the common Atari games over the years - Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, Super Breakout - but I've never really considered myself a "fan" or anything like that.

When I got into Evercade, I of course picked up the Atari collections and played the games. I found a few more Atari games I liked - Food Fight, Yars Revenge, Crystal Castles - but nothing I find myself going back to with the regularity of a Jaleco, Toaplan, or Data East.

Even when I ended up getting an Atari Super Pocket for Christmas, that very quickly became solely a Miner 2049er/Bounty Bob machine because I'm a platformer sicko.

So when Blaze announced Atari Arcade 2, I was...well I was intrigued. Because I know two things about myself: (1) I don't really know a ton about video games and (2) I have pretty broad tastes and can almost always find something to enjoy. But I also wasn't expecting to find anything too exciting here.

I was familiar with Berzerk, Frenzy, and Lost Tomb from the Atari Super Pocket (and the former two just by general reputation) and I liked them okay, but I wasn't sure what else I was in for.

Let's see how it turned out.

Berzerk

Berzerk is one of the games from the Atari Super Pocket that got pulled over onto the cart, against all precedent.

It's a barebones, maze-based shooter from the distant past (and it looks it). You control a little green humanoid that can emit lasers from itself, perhaps via a gun of some kind. And you are trapped in a maze of 64,000 rooms filled with robots that want to kill you.

That's not to say your objective is to escape, because there is no escape. Instead your objective is to kill a many robots as possible while avoiding your inevitable death for as long as possible.

Death can come at the hands of a robot, the laser of a robot, the electrified walls, or the invincible Walmart mascot that comes to roll you back if you linger too long in any room. I deal with enough British references in the Evercade community, you can allow me this one American reference.

The striking - if utilitarian - graphics match the straightforward gameplay you'll find here. Run around mazes shooting robots until you die. As you kill more robots, you gain more points. As you gain more points, the robots become more dangerous (they can shoot more often).

But as with all great arcade games, and certainly arcade games of this era that didn't have much else to barter with in their quest for your quarters, the game's seemingly-simple design creates plenty of space for developing the strategies and learning skills to max out your score.

You'll be learning to use the environment and other enemies to your advantage. You'll be identifying blind spots to hide in until you're in a position to get off one well-placed shot. You'll be deciding if you can make it up to that last robot around the corner or if you can live with being called a chicken.

Oh right that's the other thing. This game is an early example of synthesized speech and the robots will spend the whole game taunting you, including calling you a chicken if any robots are still alive when you leave a room.

And honestly it's very effective. I keep finding myself pushing my luck in a room I know I should leave and getting got. I mean, you get a score bonus for clearing a room but it's not even that much. It's always better to leave to find a fight you know you can win than to stay in a fight you might lose.

Anyway, Berzerk is great fun.

Frenzy

Frenzy is the sequel to Berzerk. So it's like Berzerk but bigger. "Better," however, is debatable.

Take Berzerk, add walls that lasers ricochet off of, walls that you can destroy to shoot or walk through, a larger variety of enemies with slightly different behaviors, and a couple of special control rooms. Et viola: Frenzy.

Frenzy is fine. It's good even. Perhaps great. But...I don't know. I have a hard time starting it up when Berzerk is right there. There's nothing wrong with Frenzy per se, just for me the number of extras in this sequel tend to take more away from the experience than they add.

Tazz-mania

Yes, yes, nothing to do with the Looney Tunes adjacent 90s cartoon with the Tasmanian Devil. Notice the legally distinct number of Zs.

Tazz-mania offers more shooty-shooty action. This time you have to shoot a bunch of little "hoppers" to clear the room and move on from the top or bottom of the screen before the walls close in on you entirely. Each room also has its own specific enemy or obstacle to contend with, such as caterpillars that move around the outside of the room, pushing your hoppers around before turning into heat-seeking butterflies. Every few levels is a bonus level where you pick up numbers off the floor to add to your score.

Like a lot of games on this cart, Tazz-mania suffers from "enemies aren't quite lined up with your eight-way shot" syndrome. And with the hoppers being quite small, it can be a little frustrating to clear them up sometimes. But your shots will bounce off the wall and the hoppers will slowly be gathered up by the walls so at long as you keep moving you shouldn't have too much trouble.

Tazz-mania is a pretty simple game, but the thing that keeps it exciting and fun are the different enemies in each room keeping things just fresh. Soon enough, though, the game runs out of ideas and you start getting "the same but more" enemy rooms. So the game may eventually grow stale, but you'll have some pretty good fun in the meantime.

Lost Tomb

Lost Tomb is a surprisingly ambitious dual-stick shooter (with the shooty stick emulated via the face button diamond a la Xenocrisis).

It feels pretty complex because it is constantly throwing messages and instructions at you without really giving much time to digest them. But when you get down to it, it's not too crazy. Shoot enemies, avoid traps, and collect treasure chests. Each room will contain a chest with a key that will unlock the doors to any adjacent rooms. The 91 different rooms are laid out in a pyramid shape. The map is presented in between rooms to help players plan their route, as there is only one path down to each lower level. The object of the game is to make your way all the way down to the bottom of the pyramid, but honestly you'll be overwhelmed by enemies long before you get there.

This game is very frantic and the action never stops. In early rooms, it feels pretty achievable to take out all of the enemies, collect all the treasure, and exit the room before the timer runs out and the earthquake starts. But soon you'll find the rooms pushing back enough that you have to decide how much you care to push your luck in each room. You can always see which chest has the key in it, so you may choose to make your way right right over and ignore the rest of them if there are too many enemies around.

The main problem with this game for me is that there are only a handful of different room layouts, which lessens the feeling of exploration. There are some other considerations for EXP and Alpha owners which we'll discuss below, because they're shared by other games.

Moon War

Moon War has you flying around (presumably around a moon of some kind) and defending a series of fuel stations from a series of attackers. After you've destroyed the attackers, you have the option of refueling yourself (gathering points for enemies destroyed but increasing the difficulty of the game) or just flying off to the next base to do it all over again.

It uses "Asteroids-style" controls - button to thrust, d-pad to rotate. The original cab offers a wheel for analogue control of your rotation and it loses something in this change to digital controls, namely confidently being able to aim your shots. Perhaps it might have been better to put the rotation on the shoulder buttons. I really liked that on the arcade version of Midnight Resistance.

But once you get it dialed in, the game is pretty fun. When the combat isn't feeling frustrating, it feels good. Nailing a shot on a fighter while drifting past on the last bit of thrust momentum feels really good. And I like the push-your-luck element of choosing to refuel (which again gives you points but increases difficulty) or flying right past but risking running out of fuel.

Overall, I think there's a moderately fun game here, just tarnished by the control scheme. I really would like to try it out with shoulder buttons for rotation, but I know that would feel unnatural on an Alpha.

Dark Planet

Dark Planet, huh? I think this game really demands respect. In some ways that demand pays off. In other ways, it's totally fine to just respect the game from a distance. But either way, it is a really interesting concept.

This game is another instance of "Asteroids-style" controls with a thrust button and a d-pad standing in for some manner of knob or spinner. Though the d-pad doesn't seem as detrimental to this game as it does to Moon War. It's probably because for a lot of the time you aren't trying to line up shots on enemy fighters but are instead bombing them.

You see, this game plays out across two different planes. Objects in green are flying around the atmosphere of the planet. That's where your ship starts. You can shoot at other fighters or gun emplacements up there. But you'll also be spending a lot of your time on bombing runs against objects on the planets surface (shown in red). The enemies are expanding from three bases scattered around the map and building rails for their laser trains to ride on, which shoot up into the atmosphere and pose a real threat to you.

So you need to take out any fighters they send up, then bomb their rails and workers before you yourself descend to the planet's surface via the tube in the upper left of the map. Once down there, you must navigate the planet's surface (make sure you take the bridges!) to pull up to an active base, blow up the train, and blow up the base itself for big points.

The map is also dominated by a giant volcano that stretches up into the atmosphere. You can use this to your advantage to hide from enemy fighters, but it also complicates your bombing runs on the nearby base and will erupt periodically and threaten to catch you in the debris if you aren't careful.

This game really takes some learning. Make sure to read the manual and watch the attract screen to understand what is going on. It took me quite a while to destroy my first base and get onto the leaderboard. I'm glad I stuck with it because it is a cool game, but I'm honestly not sure how often I'll be returning to it.

If I ever see a cabinet in real life, though, I'm playing the hell out of it.

Rescue

Back in the twin-stick world, we've got Rescue. In Rescue, it's raining men as little men fall out of the sky into the water and you must fly your chopper over to them and lower a ladder to rescue them. While you attempt to rescue them, various enemies will try to stop you. Once you've collected the requisite number of little men, you drop them off on an island and move onto the next mission.

The number and type of enemies change as you advance through the levels, from enemy choppers, to sharks, to speed boats, to subs. You get bonus points for rescues "under fire" but you can only move a little bit while the little man climbs your ladder so you are wide open to attacks during that time.

Every few levels, you'll get a bonus level where a bunch of men drop into the water at once and you have 10 seconds to pick up as many as you can.

The game looks great, with a neat deep parallax effect. And it plays very well, offering mostly-just-the-right level of challenge.

The considerations I promised above for Lost Tomb apply here, too, but again we'll get to them down in the Wrap Up section.

Minefield

As you can probably tell from the screenshots, Minefield is a close relation to Rescue. But this time you're driving a tank through the desert.

Avoid the mines and pick up the missiles. Shoot the enemies, but make sure the planes don't crash into you. Use the missiles to blow up bases as you drive past. Like with Rescue, new enemy types show up in each new level. Once you've completed your first mission the difficulty really starts to ramp up.

I don't really have much else to say about this one. It's a fun game with a cool parallax effect.

The same considerations I've been teasing for other games apply here, but again we'll get to those in a second.

Fire Truck

Fire Truck is a game, alright. And it's a neat piece of history. But I'm not sure how often I'll be dipping into it again over time.

Basically, it plays like a top-down version of Night Driver. Navigate your big, unwieldy fire truck through the city streets, avoiding parked cars and oil slicks to get as far as you can before you run out of fuel. As you pick up speed, your truck becomes increasingly difficult to control.

The original cabinet had a 2-player variant that looks like a lot of fun. And I could see passing the controller back and forth a couple of times trying for the high score being fun for a bit. But probably not more than a filler game in that case. And maybe that's okay.

Maze Invaders

Bringing us full circle on the cart is another maze shooter, Maze Invaders.

Maze Invaders takes place across a series of connected maze rooms filled with obstacles, enemies, various gimmicks, and most importantly tasty, tasty fruit. Collect all the fruit in a maze to open doors around the edge that will take you to other rooms.

Each maze room has a number and is always connected in the same way to other rooms, so you can start to learn your way around if you want. Or make a map. Between rooms, the game will tell you where the bonus watermelon is hiding, so if you know your way around well enough you can plan a route. Otherwise, you can collect bonuses for doing things like going through a certain number of doors of the same color.

The maze layouts and gimmicks provide a very interesting variety to the gameplay that incentivizes you to explore. And the predictable layout of the rooms rewards repeat play and learning your way around to hunt the bonuses.

There are some rough edges, through - sometimes literally. When a new enemy is spawning, it enters from the edge of the map, so if you aren't careful you can find yourself standing in just the wrong spot when that happens and burn a life for no good reason. On top of that, some of the enemies can shoot back at you and it can be difficult to avoid these or to shoot them before they get too close since everything isn't always perfectly gridded.

So more often than I usually like, you find yourself losing a life in a way that feels unfair or like it isn't your fault. But when that's not happening, the game provides plenty of reasons to keep playing.

Wrap Up

I came into this not being sure what to expect. Atari Arcade 1 has never been one of my favorite arcade carts, so what hope does Atari Arcade 2 have?

Well it turns out this cart succeeds more often than it fails for me. And even the ones that don't quite work for me still have my interest and my respect despite being limited by the available controls. And also Fire Truck was there.

Okay, I promised you some considerations to, uh, consider with regards to the twin-stick games - Lost Tomb, Rescue, and Minefield. And we're finally at that point.

These games are vertical games that rely on four face buttons. This works pretty well on the VS, but has some downsides for the EXP and the Alpha.

On the EXP, you'll be unable to use tate mode for these games because you need all four face buttons. Playing horizontally can be a little tough depending on your eyesight. In Rescue in particular, enemy bullets are painfully small on the EXP (and probably even worse on a Super Pocket).

And on the Alpha, you have no diamond of face buttons to use here. I played a bit with remapping the controls to a tilted diamond (you know, a square). Remapping ABXY to BYAX respectively, forming an inward-facing diamond that more or less works ergonomically for my hand. It take a little getting used to the different angle, but seems to be perfectly fine after a couple of rounds.

So if you're on the Alpha you may want to break out a regular joypad. And if you're on an EXP you may want to keep your eyesight in mind when deciding on this one.

These games are old. And they feel old. But most of the time, they feel old in the good way. They are, for the most part, straightforward games with simple systems that leave plenty of room for practicing and demonstrating skill on the way to climbing the leaderboard.

In short, a solid batch of score-chasers that you should Consider picking up.

By the way, despite how much I like this cart I still don't consider myself an Atari Guy. But that's mostly because these are not actually Atari games. I guess "Stern Arcade" must've sounded too unfriendly.