Banished from Earth Classic Game Room broadcasts from the Intergalactic Space Arcade on its never-ending mission to review everything.

Welcome to Classic Game Room. Are you ready to ride the beam? Are you ready to play one of the greatest games on your Atari 2600? It's Beamrider.

Blast off with fun and excitement. Blast off with Beam Rider from 1983 for your Atari 2600.

This is one of the very best Activision games that you can get from the era, and as many of you know, Activision was the master of Atari 2600 programming. And this is one of their greatest efforts.

Right up there with River Raid and Enduro and Pitfall, it's Beam Rider.

Which reminds me of the excellent Juno First, which is similar, but here's what you do: you move them back and forth along the grid as these enemies attack you from beyond.

Hyperspace or outer space or wherever, wherever you are in the Atari 2600 land.

After surviving each sector you encounter an end boss evil mothership kind of thing that you can shoot with your torpedoes, but you've only got three of them, so aim carefully.

Each sector gets more challenging as you encounter indestructible asteroids, new enemies, homing missiles, and all kinds of space things trying to kill you with lasers.

This game could almost be described as a 2D version of Tempest. It's also very similar to that game. So Juno First combined with Tempest, yeah, sign me up because it's good.

I previously reviewed Beamrider on the Intellivision, where it also plays extremely well, and the Intellivision can generally handle more complex games.

This is also on ColecoVision and the Atari computers, the 8-bit computers. It plays like an 8-bit game, but it's on the 2600 here, which is why this version of Beamrider is so darned impressive.

Because this shouldn't be possible on the 2600. There's just too much going on and it plays too well. What magic did they use to create Beam Rider? What evil sorcery was Activision into back in the day? I want some.

The enemy diversity makes this game a lot of fun. There's the green things that will lock onto your line on the beam or whatever and attack you. They're kinda like homing missiles.

You've got UFOs flying around, the annoying things that jump back and forth across the lines and shoot at you, indestructible asteroids.

Those things that look like they come straight out of Tempest, and there's even more as you keep playing.

Not to mention the Evil Mother Ship. You've only got three torpedoes. You fire that by pushing up on your joystick or your gamepad, depending on what you're using.

So play carefully because it's easy to launch that thing by mistake. And yeah, I know. I know that's what she said.

Yeah! Alien destroyed.

If you collect for the Atari 2600, you absolutely must have Beam Rider in your collection. It doesn't even cost all that much. It's not a rare game.

It's a good game, even if the other versions are all even better than this one.

It's hard to admit that the worst version of Beamrider is one of the best Atari 2600 games, because it's ambitious and it actually pulls it off.

The Atari was best at simple games. It still is. But this one is just really an incredible programming effort all around, as well as terrific game design.

Beamrider, one of the best on the 2600.

One of the best right up there with Juno First. In fact, this was sent to the show by the same person who donated Juno First, Andrew from Minford, Ohio. So thank you.

Again, Andrew, you are correct. Juno First and Beam Rider are two of the best on the 2600, no question.

I also have this game lurking about for ColecoVision and Atari computers, so we'll watch those reviews soon.

But I tip my hat, sir. To you, Beam Rider, an incredible game from 1983.