Demon Attack

When looking at pre-NES console games, Demon Attack makes it to plenty of "best of" lists—a huge hit back in the day and now forgotten.

I can see why as the main push that you usually hear about Demon Attack is that "it looks perfect" and that it "plays like the arcade". In a world where every game is available to you, that might not be enough, but Demon Attack still has some cool stuff. For one thing, it does have some proper weird and colourful graphics. The aliens look cool and how they "BWERRRRP' into your vision is also a plus. Something that feels not typical of games of its era. Their look and warping add flavour to the game.

Now what might be exhausting is that there are countless Space Invaders-type games, this does add a bit of pep with the enemy's less obvious patterns, the enemies splitting in two and even dive bombing you add to the stress. On the Atari 2600, after you get good enough, the enemies just start repeating after a few cycles while other versions (specifically the popular Intellivision port) add a final boss that accentuates the game's derivativeness Phoenix.

What might hold this back from being super amazing today is that outside the basic thing, you'd want in a shooter, it doesn't do things better or anything than similar arcade games do and lacks in stuff you kind of want (power-ups, etc.)

It's a cool "Atari 2600" game that has decent sound (compare this to the ear-piercing noises something like Combat makes) and gives blocky Atari graphics a good name. A great game to play when you have that Atari-fix, but not revolutionary.

Pretty authentic arcade experience on the VCS. One of the better games for sure.