Game

I felt like playing random Atari games, so I did. This is Laser Blast, a relatively liked Activision game on the Atari 2600, and one I’d never even heard of before I picked it up to play. Like most Atari games, it’s a simple arcadey game. It’s like the inverse of Missile Command. You play as a UFO and you go around on the planets surface blasting turrets that shoot lasers back at you. You can move left or right, and shoot. If you’re moving as you shoot, you aim slightly left or right, otherwise you fire straight down. Your laser has some good width to it. Once you clear all the turrets, you move onto the next screen.

Game

This game is about rhythm. The enemy AI is easily manipulated if you do the same movements over and over, so it’s about finding those movements then committing them to a rhythm to quickly blow up all three turrets and move on, over, and over. To master this game, I had to get 100,000 points. At about 30 points per turret, that’s a lot of turrets. Apparently if you did this back in the day, you could send the picture in to Activision to get a patch for the Activision Federation of Laser Blasters? I want my damn patch, Activision.

The higher difficulties don’t change much, other than the turrets’ rate of fire and movement capabilities. It certainly gets more challenging, but you just need to find the right rhythm again. This game isn’t MUCH, but I had fun with it for about an hour.