Attack of the bar graphs! By Dan LoosenMarch 2, 2004
Wohoo! Another 2600 game with a title screen!
Simply shoot the advancing color bars.
Reader Average Score
80% (7 scores.)
Great
Wow! Most of the games that are really rare for the 2600 are rare because... well, quite frankly they suck. Ram It is a rare 2600 game that doesn't suck! The game's premise... Uh... I've been playing this game for years and I still can't figure out what the heck is supposed to be going on. I do know that the game is serious fun though!
There isn't much to say in the way of graphics or sound. It's there. It does what it does. Control is the usual for an Atari 2600 game -- very good because there isn't much to do wrong with only a four-way joystick and a singular button. So what is in the actual game?
Basically, you are a hamburger-type thing in the center of the screen, and you have to shoot advancing bars. If the bars reach the center of the screen, you can't shoot them anymore and you're basically screwed. There is also a countdown that, if it reaches zero and there are still bars on the screen, means that your life is over. If you can finish off all of the advancing bars before that point, you get the bonus of however much it is.
This is a totally unique concept, and it works exceptionally well. The action is intense, and you'll find yourself playing this rarity quite often. I know I do.
This was one of my favorite games from my "first wave" of games that I bought with my 2600 ("first wave" meaning when I bought a bunch of games for a few years, put the Atari up for years, and then got back into it a few years ago due to this internet and trading thingy :) ).
No one else liked this game, since they couldn't figure out THE one thing crucial to survival: try to clear out an entire side first (left or right), that way you won't get trapped. Everyone would give up. So try a few games of this out first before dismissing it, it shouldn't take long...
...and then once you got into it, and time is tick tick ticking away, it became an interesting battle for survivial, as each full-grown bar that you could shoot ("ram") would add about 23 seconds onto your counter. So that was interesting, I can't think of another 2600 game (or even 7800, for that matter!) that did that.
Finally, one last unique feature on this...well a few, actually: one, it was one of the few games that retained a high score (until you shut it off). Two, as more and more powerful systems were threatening the existance of the wimpy 2600, and more and more features were added onto games, this was one of those later games that you could start a new game by pressing the button on your controller. And last, according to the instructions, Telesys was planning on going a step further: you could actually SELECT a game by pushing up and down on your joystick. But that ended up not happening after all by the time of this game's release (unless that was implemented on a later version).
Great game, for those of us that can understand, and appreciate it. 90% from me :)
whups by Darryl B.
2006-10-16 17:53:16
I take back part of what I said with my first comment, with having 23 seconds added when you hit a full grown bar once it flashes...actually it's 13 seconds, now that I think about it. Plus this was the better of the two (in my opinion) of the very similiar-themed game of Squeeze Box, released by U. S. Games.
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