Title: Atari Arcade 2
System: Evercade
Price: $24.99
Release Date: Late April 2025
Prelude
Years after the last Atari cart (and after all prior ones were made Legacy) the new Wade Rosen-run Atari is back with Evercade to put out another Arcade cart! This time around you have more of the games they acquired in recent years, with most of them being from Stern. There are a couple of actual Atari games here, though.
Presentation
All games are Arcade titles, and they are all emulated with proper sound and visuals as they usually are on Evercade. Interestingly enough, Dark Planet even manages to reproduce the overlay and differing colors to help distinguish between the different layers!
Using TATE mode with most of these games on an Evercade EXP is a lot trickier though, since you need four buttons for most of the games, and TATE mode only lets you play with two without needing claw hands.
Gameplay
You know the drill here. Let’s get on with it!
Fire Truck- The first of two Atari games in the Atari collection, this very primitive driving game has you drive around in a fire truck, making sharp turns, avoiding collisions and trying to get a higher score before the clock runs out. That’s it, that’s the entire game, and Fire Truck is just as dull as it sounds.
Sure, it can be pretty funny to honk the horn obnoxiously as you play, but unless you want to go for a perfect, crash-free run, there’s really not much here to warrant replaying for a better score, although the two player mode is mildly amusing due to the awkward teamwork required to control both halves of the big truck. Always a throwaway game in any Atari set it comes on, and I’d rather we have gotten Tempest or Red Baron instead.
Berzerk– The first Stern game on the set, and what an excellent one to start with. Here you’re in a maze, and must destroy every single robot within the room you’re in before moving onto the next screen. A funny, bad-sounding voice will taunt you as you fight with the robots, and eventually a bouncing smiley face known as Evil Otto will start to sneak up on you, and cannot be destroyed, so you gotta get outta that room fast before he touches you. Thankfully you don’t need to clear the screen to escape it, but you lose out on bonus points that way.
Along with just trying to stay alive by not touching the enemies, you have their shots to worry about, along with your own, since they can ricochet back onto you and be fatal. If you angle your shots right, you can sneak up on enemies this way, but it is very easy to have them backfire. Running into the walls also proves to be fatal, and having that mechanic present made me realize why so many fans of the original did not like Berzerk Recharged; it just has less tension, while this original game has you always on edge, with the urge to get risky for those bonus points rising the longer you play and the more screens you clear. An excellent scorechaser deserving of its fame.
Maze Invaders- The second Atari game to be in this collection, and this one didn’t even come to market back in the day, only resurfacing in retro compilations in recent years. It’s a fairly fun game where you take control of some blue ball man who must go around mazes, shooting at enemies and going through different doors to work towards bonus points.
You can hold a button to shoot while going backwards when in a pinch, but otherwise you just gotta shoot and head for the exit of your choice. Pretty solid scorechasing fun, but nothing mindblowing, so I can see why this didn’t release near the North American market crash.
Moon War– A base defending shooter which takes a lot of getting used to. On the original Arcade machine, you had a wheel of sorts you could use to turn your ship around, and that has been mapped to the Evercade D-pad mostly well, save for the High Score entry screen. (since the wheel sensitivity also was a factor there, you’ll be jumping all over the place with the letters)
The main goal here is to defend your bases from invading enemies by taking out as many as possible, and then docking in said base to get bonus points for all the enemies destroyed up to that point, while also refueling your ship. Each base has a shield that protects it from enemy fire, but once that shield goes away the base can get destroyed and leave you with a longer gap to refuel. In a weird way, that reminds me of a tower defense game of all things, despite how this was a very early Arcade game, and Moon War is pretty decent fun once you get the hang of the thrusting and turning.
You can only really mess up if you run out of fuel or get blown up, so if you feel you’re better off skipping a base and making it to the next one while taking out enemies, you can do just that, albeit without as many points as you would get if you went to each base in sequence. The only real gripe I have here is how sensitive the controls are on the high score entry screen, but that seems unavoidable due to the nature of the wheel controller being emulated here.
Dark Planet– A weird, multilayer shooter that I can’t even tell if it’s reproduced accurately here, despite how Blaze handled the odd mechanics. See, the original Arcade machine had this cool Visor that showed you two layers, a top one and a bottom one with sprites on each layer, indicated by color and the background. You go up a pipe near the top of the screen to change layers, and you have both an aerial attack and a direct fire to take out the enemies and their generators/cargo lines.
Obviously your Evercade doesn’t come with any fancy visor to hook onto your device, so Blaze replicated the dual layer mechanic by using the arcade background (so you know how to handle the collision and go between layers) and separating the colors by Green and Red to tell which ship is what. The end result works OK, but I feel something must be missing because Dark Planet abruptly goes from pretty enjoyable to outright infuriating. Sure, you may feel you have it good shooting at the ground enemies and their generators while bombing their cargo lines to cut off the bases from, but when you go to the bottom layer, try taking your time only to get blown up by a shot that is outright invisible, I struggle to see what I’m missing here.
The green shots are fine, and the Red shots are usually fine, but every now and then I just abruptly die for no reason whatsoever, without touching an enemy. I see the other enemies pointing my direction which makes me wonder if it fired a shot and it just flickered out of existence, since I have no idea how I could get shot without seeing the actual bullet due to this stupid coloring game. This means you can go from careful strategy and having a good amount of genuine fun blowing up bases and using the walls strategically to just exploding because you couldn’t see an invisible red bullet. I have to be going insane, but the sheer frustration of these dumb, random deaths was enough to turn me off the game altogether. Maybe Dark Planet was best left alone and locked in that weird Visor machine.
Frenzy– The sequel to Berzerk! Looks incredibly similar to the first game, only with a lot more purple. Plays a lot like Berzerk too, except now you have walls that can be broken apart (and don’t kill you on touch), the Evil Otto that comes in can now be temporarily destroyed, and now you have special rooms that show up after you clear a certain amount of screens. From an actually terrifying looking Mama Otto, to energy stations needing to be destroyed, this more or less comes off as a a remix of Frenzy.
Does the lack of gargantuan change make Frenzy lackluster? Not really, the core gameplay loop is still great for scorechasing and while the game isn’t as brutal as Berzerk, the extra variety in special rooms do offer some good challenge. The destructible walls also mean the enemies have more chances to shoot at you, so while some things have been toned down, Frenzy isn’t a cakewalk by any means, even if I personally found the first one to be more fun due to the risk you had from your own shots being able to bounce back at you more often.
Lost Tomb– This interesting vertical action game was previously on the Atari Super Pocket, where Lost Tomb had its first ever reissue there. Here you control an explorer who must go through different floors of a pyramid to discover treasure while avoiding traps, and shooting down enemies in his way. With branching paths, fun scoring bonuses, and decent variety here, Lost Tomb is a brutal yet challenging scorechaser that I’d normally just note under the same impression as many, many other similar western arcade games from the early 80s that mostly just focus on score or punishing you extensively vs having an actual end goal to deal with.
Except bizarrely, this game might be the first time where you can use a quarter to get extra in-game items. Every few stages you’ll get an offer (“A message from our sponsor”) to put in another quarter for extra flares mid-game, which will really help you out as the stages and enemy patterns get more ridiculous. The true question is, does using the extra flares count as tainting the leaderboard? Well since you only have the local in-game leaderboard to worry about, that’s all up to you. I personally don’t believe so, since the game openly asks you mid-credit.
All the flares do is create an explosion around you that also tears into walls and destroys enemies in the vicinity, so they aren’t a god mode upgrade by any means, and you’ll still have to use them strategically. By and large learning the dual stick shooting setup is the key to getting through stages and scoring big as you try to eventually find the best route through the pyramid. You can fight enemies during the intermission stages between levels, but those birds get real nasty if you idle around too long to try and use them for score. This one is quite enjoyable as a scorechaser, and one I really want to try and eventually clear for real.
Rescue– A game that’s impossible to enjoy in TATE mode on the EXPs due to being a dual stick game originally! Here you control a rescue helicopter, where you must shoot down incoming enemies that try to get in your way as you aim to rescue a certain amount of people stuck in the water. From helicopters, sharks and sea vessels, there’s plenty to dance around as you aim to make a successful rescue.
You’d think this concept wouldn’t really mean much or lead to much to write home about, but Rescue is shockingly addicting for a scorechaser; using the face buttons in place of a second stick ala Lost Tomb is odd, but serviceable, and if you’re getting fired upon while rescuing someone, you gain bonus points. Naturally, risk and reward come into play here, and even just going after enemies here can get you a good amount of extra points. Day turns to night, and the difficulty ramps up at a nice pace the further you go, and since there’s always that final challenge of making a landing on an island, this game keeps you on your toes aplenty.
Very fun and easily the biggest surprise of the cart, and my favorite scorechaser to go back to here, even if it did make me realize the TATE mode capabilities were more limited than I thought.
Tazz-Mania– This is the one TATE game I felt was actually pretty OK in TATE mode! A simple two-button vertical shooter, Tazz-Mania has you controlling some thing that fires up at all sorts of weird enemies and obstacles in your way, while also having a bomb to use for screen clearing in absolute emergencies. Destroy all the enemies, and flee the screen before the walls shut.
It’s like a weird vertical take on Robotron, but a lot less chaotic and far more manageable with just a single stick and a button. Each new set of enemies you encounter get weirder and weirder, making it all part of the fun to keep surviving as long as you can to rack up those point to see what other weird stuff gets thrown your way! Simple, but still a good use of a couple of minutes every now and then.
Minefield– Made by some of the same people behind Rescue, the dual stick setup returns as this time you’re a tank, collecting missiles and making your way to the next destination on a long, long path in war-torn territory. Airborne and land-based combat ensues, with your powerful missiles being used to destroy the enemy bases you come across along the way for bonus points.
You have to keep your eyes peeled to both air and ground enemies, and while it doesn’t have the exact same level of simplicity and addiction factor as Rescue, Minefield is still a pretty darn good scorechaser that I had a lot of fun discovering through this cartridge, even if it’s a smidge beneath Rescue in my humble opinion. It’s always oh so satisfying to launch a perfectly timed missile to destroy the base Sky Kid style, and dealing with both aerial and ground enemies is enough of a challenge to keep you on your toes, and I can definitely see how this spun off of Rescue with similar DNA. A bit less fun than Berzerk, but easily the third best game on the entire cart for me.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Atari Arcade 2 is a weird one on Evercade. This mostly consists of the Stern games with most of them never being reissued on anything else besides this very cart, and they’re all fairly fun, even if Dark Planet can feel outright cheap. While the first Atari Arcade had some absolute classics and outstanding scorechasers despite some false advertising with Asteroids, Atari Arcade 2 has more of a focus on obscurities, and while a lot of them are fun, I can’t say any are a must play besides Rescue and Berzerk.
The fact that Atari themselves still has their own games that would have been perfect here such as Tempest, Red Baron or Black Widow, yet we got stuck with frickin Dark Planet and Moon War despite their odd control schemes/design, I can’t imagine throwing in one of those would have hurt the set in any way. Anything would have been better than Fire Truck for crying out loud, which is the most filler game I’ve seen on an Evercade collection to date. At least Maze Invaders makes a good case for this not being a complete Atari-less Atari set, but even still, the focus on Stern is pretty peculiar, though I’m glad most of the inclusions here are fun.
Still, if you’re looking for an Arcade cart with nothing but scorechasers, this is the one for you. If you want something more in-depth like the Taito carts though, this ain’t it.
I give Atari Arcade 2 a 6 out of 10.