"THE greatest Atari game of all time!!"

I have memories of me and the family sitting around the tv immersed in Q*Bert almost every evening after dinner as a toddler. My older brother was the Q*Bert master, and we all enjoyed watching him (nowadays my parents could care less about video games). A few years ago, I bought a used Atari and my own copy of Q*Bert.

In Q*Bert, you play an odd orange, armless creature with a long snout. You are presented with a pyramid of blocks, all in the same color. Your task is to jump around the pyramid changing the cubes to the color specified while avoiding the bad guys that chase you around the pyramid.

Coily the snake hatches from a purple ball that falls down the pyramid, and if the difficulty setting is set on hard, you'll also encounter a red ball that falls down the pyramid frequently. If you touch these guys, you lose a life. Sam the flea-like creature with sunglasses won't cause you any physical harm, but he will appear occassionaly to turn some of your cubes back to their original color, forcing you to turn back and do them over again. Occassionally a harmless green ball will fall down the pyramid. Grabbing it freezes the screen for a few seconds, allowing you to do your thing free of harm from the frozen baddies, and also granting you some bonus points.

Along the side of the pyramid you'll find a few floating platforms that, when jumped on, will take you to the top of the cube, sometimes causing Coily to attempt to follow you, causing him to jump off of the side of the pyramid (the first game to feature suicidal snakes). While the discs are for avoiding Coily, I generally avoid using them as sometimes he'll wait up at the top of the pyramid for you, and you'll land right on top of him. I prefer to jump right over him, but it requires careful timing.

The game is extremely long, and I'm not even sure if there's an end to it. It just goes on and on, getting more and more fast paced. As I got deeper and deeper into the game, I began to sweat, my heart pounded, and I clutched the joystick feverently as I repeatedly tried to avoid the now lightning-fast Coily. As the game goes on, you'll no longer have the merely change the color of the cube, oh no. Eventually you'll have to change the color, and avoid touching it again, lest it revert back to its original color. You'll even have to change colors twice, and then avoid touching it again or it'll revert to its original color! The action gets extremely frantic as the game progresses. It absorbs you in to the point where the house could be on fire, and you wouldn't even notice.

The graphics are beautiful for the Atari 2600. Everything is colorful and well-drawn.

The sound is equally great, with lots of different sound effects and ditties.

To sum things up, Q*Bert is a must have for anyone who owns an Atari 2600 or Atari 7800 (the 7800 is compatible with most 2600 games, save for a few). You can find it for about 3 bucks online, and it's worth that and more. In my opinion, it's one of the greatest old school games ever made.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 04/04/04