Hey! Guess what sort of vessel you would use to raid a river. If you guessed “a boat, obviously”…
You’re wrong! It’s a plane. Also, there’s no title screen for this, so enjoy that sweet, sweet early 80s box art.
River Raid was one of many titles released by Activision for the Atari 2600 before Atari ruined everything and nearly killed the industry. In this one, you play as a boat plane flying above a river that’s in desperate need of raiding – there’s just too many boats and other stuff! The only sensible thing is to send them all to heaven. As you’d expect, the controls are pretty simple – left and right steer your plane, up and down control your speed (it’s an auto-scroller), and The One Button fires your plane gun. That’s about it.
The game’s other main mechanic is its fuel containers, seen in the pic below. You have a couple of options with these – you can fly over them to immediately get fuel, just like real planes do, or you can just blow them up for points. They’re fairly plentiful, so you’ll likely end up doing a bit of both.
At various points, you’ll need to shoot down helicopters, other planes, boats, and so forth. You’ll also occasionally need to take out bridges, because flying over them is evidently not an option.
As I’ve mentioned in another review or two, Activision offered cool patches to players who achieved super high scores in their games – all you had to do was mail in a picture of your score and a few bucks, and you got the patch in the mail a few weeks later. I wish game companies still did this – I would’ve totally rocked a “You’re Good at Guitar Hero” or “You played too much Destiny” patch. Anyway, here’s what the River Raid patch looks like:
Neat! It’s like the previously mentioned sweet art. The minimum score to get this patch was 15,000 points, and I definitely didn’t get close to that. The various passageways get trickier as the game goes on, which I really quite appreciate – the increasingly difficulty definitely kept it from getting boring, and made me want to keep trying to beat my high scores.
Activision’s early Atari offerings are typically pretty good, and this one is no exception. If you have an Atari 2600 or one of the dozens of various “Flashback” games or consoles, River Raid is definitely worth a bit of your time. It’s simple, very replay-able, and a lot of fun. There’s also a much more obscure sequel, which was remarkably released for the 2600 in 1988 – well after anyone was buying Atari stuff. That one’s pretty hard to find, and is pretty similar to the original.
Our next game is probably best known for being an “unknown gem” in the NES library. Does that mean it’s known? Who knows! I don’t. See you then!
My favorite Atari game!