Beamrider

Beamrider is a fast rail shooter in which the player controls a fighter craft confined to one of fifteen beams of the enemy fleet's energy grid. The goal is to progressively destroy waves of attackers moving along the individual beams before they reach the player, and at the end of each grid to face a large enemy vessel that must be shot down with a special missile of limited supply, replenished only by reaching a certain score, so the player must manage ammunition throughout the entire game.

The game was designed for Activision by the respected designer David Rolfe, and it arrived on the Atari 5200 just a year after the Atari 2600 version, offering sharper graphics, smoother movement, and a more faithful color rendition of the beam grid thanks to the more powerful hardware, which made the action look clearer than on the older console. The scoring system encouraged players to risk close flybys past enemies in exchange for a higher score, turning an otherwise simple concept into a surprisingly deep action game with its own risk-based strategy and a strong incentive to replay for a better result. Successive grids sped up and introduced new enemy types, forcing players to continually adjust their risk-taking strategy.

Beamrider was among Activision's most commercially successful titles of the early 1980s, and its conversion to the Atari 5200 let owners of the console experience one of the era's most acclaimed shooters at a quality approaching the arcade experience. The console's analog joystick also allowed for finer aiming between the individual beams than the digital controllers of older systems, making the game even more accessible and still one of the more playable titles in the Atari 5200 catalog today.

Why play it: Beamrider offers one of the best-tuned rail shooters of the golden era on the Atari 5200, with the added benefit of sharper graphics than the Atari 2600 version.