When one thinks about 2k games for the Atari 2600, they think of titles like Kaboom, Breakout, and Golf. The first ever Atari 2600 homebrew, Okie Dokie, is 2k. Well, a year ago, I thought I'd take a stab at a better 2k game for the Atari 2600. My first one about a stalk of celery burning vegetarians in an incinerator was just too far out there. It was also my first assembly game. If I was going to make a 2k game, I would need to do it in assembly instead of Batari Basic.

I had to stop programming the game because I just couldn't get the scanline steady, which meant the display would jiggle a little when certain things happened on a real TV. Oddly, the emulator doesn't emulate the jiggling display, so I have to play it on an Atari 7800 (or 2600) to see it jiggle. The emulator does however count the scanlines, and if it goes above (or below) 262, the jiggling will happen.

So, with the Hamburgers game gear game complete, I needed something to work on. I decided I would come back to this just for fun, to see if I could make the scanline steady. I wouldn't get mad because my hopes weren't very high with this. But a few hours later, I came up with something. I haven't seen the scanline be anything except 262. A red number means the scanline number changes, and it does that if the reset switch is used, but it doesn't jiggle on my 7800.

So what is this game? I was trying to think of a game that a.) I could program, b.) would fit in 2k, and c.) be fun to play. I thought of the old SNES game Mario Paint. It had a minigame where you swat flies. The light bulb came on in my mind and I began to work on it. And this is the result:

You control a flyswatter (the purple box-like thing). Avoid the hornets and the bees and swat the flies that take a bite of the banana in the middle of the screen if you give them enough time to. The game ends if you touch a hornet, or touch a bee, or the banana completely disappears. And it fit in 2k. I have abour 30 bytes left to make changes or fix bugs, or perhaps add another feature, although I don't know what that would be seeing as how it would need to be only about 30 bytes.

The cat has been acting strange lately. They say they do that if there's an earthquake about to happen...