Atari 2600 Game
Produced by: Parker Brothers
Model Number: PB5330
Rarity: 2 (common)
Year of Release: n/a
Programmer: Charlie Heath
Yet another game that caused me to spend much of my youth in a basement. The plot of this game was that you were the pilot of some sort of ship and you had to reflect the "nuclear particles" against the wall to kill them while they're trying to do the same thing to you. Imagine a game of bumper cars with deadly walls. At the mean time, the middle of the screen has a "reactor" which starts out with a protective shield around it, but eventually loses that shield. If you touch the edges of the reactor, it will pull you towards the center... Which, surprise surprise, is deadly. You could also leave behind decoys, which the enemy would be convinced is you. You could use this to lure the enemy into bumping themselves into the wall, or put them in a "bonus chamber" which gave you extra points for the enemies bouncing around inside (but the inside of that room was still deadly to you, and the opening was very small). As you killed off enemies, eventually the core would return to the smaller size. (And you would progress to the next level.)
This game is highly addictive. Very simple premise but lots of fun. And the music was VERY memorable. (I just started humming it in my head. The sounds for that game were very good.)
Apparently, they also had an arcade version which used a trackball as the input device (the console version used a joystick). The graphics looked better, and it looks like there were other aspects of the game.
The top part of this node was derived from the AtariAge website. The rest is from my own fading memory.