Missile Command

Out of the big Atari games released this year, I think Missile Command is my favorite. Lots of strategy and forward thinking is required to keep your cities from being destroyed. It's easy to project your worst fears onto this game: alien invaders, international warfare, or whatever kind of stressful situation involving shooting down dropping bombs is currently in the back of your mind. As with other early video games, its power is in its ability to stimulate your imagination, but unlike many others it has an addicting gameplay loop as well.

You can bet this would warrant an awesome 80s horror movie: Some gamers are rounded to play Missile Command in an abandoned warehouse at gun point by some crazy terrorist, and if they fail at the game, various cities across America really do get nuked in real time. Make it happen!

One gameplay concept I find baffling though, is that you can renew your cities based on the scores you attain, which to me makes no sense: You already get a hefty bonus if you keep a huge number of cities, and if you survive a round, you easily get a bonus sixth city if you survive with five, for instance. It's a self-sustaining Gradius syndrome where, once you lose the flow and most of your cities, you can never bring yourself back up again. I think there has to be a gameplay tweek that rewards renewed cities based on the efficiency of fire or something. But other than that, this game is truly the stuff of nightmares, and you'll be hyperventilating Miles Dyson-style by the end. Wait till you see Robotron!

Please remember to emulate the trackball with the mouse if you're playing it on MAME, because it feels like the perfect mouse game, and you can map the individual launch bases to the left, middle, and right mouse buttons respectively. If you can't be bothered with setting up MAME, IGN has a very good arcade port on their site, with mouse controls included.

Protect Cairo from enemy bombs. To do this you have at your disposal a missile launcher, and you must aim and predict the movement of enemy missiles in order to intercept them. The objective is to hold on as long as you can before everything is destroyed by the missiles. Kinda shows the futility of war, but thats maybe reading too deep into the game. It controls pretty well, and controlling the missiles is unique enough to distinguish it from Space Invaders. Cool gem.