Laser Blast

Another stark Atari 2600 Game Room alumni; Laser Blast is notable for being an early effort by Pitfall designer David Crane, and for a pounding monotony that easily feeds into attainable high-scoring. Players control a single golden flying saucer, cursed to roam featureless expanses, frying trios of ground based resistance with pulsing purple death rays. Clock up a thousand points, easily accomplished once your multiplier starts to multiply, and you get a reinforcement. On a peak point earn you'll be chalking up ninety points per kill, adding an extra try for every four screens cleared. Once you've got yourself locked into a twitch and shoot pattern, you'll be near invincible.

The game doesn't change either; it's always the same enemies, trapped in the same world. Eventually your real foe becomes complacency. You'll break out of locked extermination sequence, trying to showboat, causing your craft to be mercilessly shot out the sky. A short, sharp shock, forcing you to readjust back to mechanical input. You must comply. Successful interaction with Laser Blast is rapidly shifting into place, and firing. Pause, or miss your shot, and you'll be punished with a lethally instant retaliation blast from below. Your only real means of self-expression exists when you fail. Once destroyed, enemy attack sequences freeze allowing you, if you so wish, to adjust the fall of your dying craft so that your wreckage lands on the enemy. They won't even attempt to move. They expect to die. Although terminally basic, Laser Blast is interesting because it exists as a kind of benign hypnotic funk. You're constantly rewarded with points and lives, simply for memorising a brief series of button taps. The game never gets harder or easier. It's just a static, endless, war of attrition. Who will get bored first?