M*A*S*H

"Mildly entertaining."

M*A*S*H for the Atari 2600 is based on the popular 70's television show of the same title. The game focuses on the part of the 4077th's job including picking up injured soldiers from the Korean forests, and then later performing surgery on them. This game is one of a few made by 20th Century Fox. Seems every one was getting in on the Atari 2600 scene!

There are a total of eight different play options in M*A*S*H. The main play option first includes you piloting a large helicopter and picking up injured soldiers and bringing them back to the medical camps. To make the game a little more interesting though, you are competing against a rival medical division to save the most lives. This opposing helicopter will also try and gather as many soldiers as possible. Each helicopter has a limited number of soldiers it can hold, so you must return to base every once in a while to lighten the load and carry more soldiers. To make the game slightly more challenging, there is also an enemy tank shooting at both of you. If you get hit by the tank, there is really no repercussion except for the fact that the other helicopter will be at work collecting soldiers while you are respawned.

After a few waves of picking up soldiers, you must now operate on them. Each of them has a bullet lodged in them somewhere. You must now play a game very similar to the popular board game “Operation”, where you must remove pieces of a human body without touching the patient's body. You only have around fifteen seconds to remove as many bullets from as many bodies as possible. After this, you will be returned to picking up soldiers. The game will repeat this process until one player maxes out the score at 999.

The various other game play options include having a bunch of soldiers dropped from planes and you must pick them up while competing against another player. There is also one mode identical to the first one I described except with smaller helicopters, and the last two are variations of the “Operation” type game.

Graphics
This game was a late bloomer for the Atari 2600, so of course it has pretty good graphics compared to most other Atari games. The most memorable parts of the graphics are the skyline at the top of the screen. It is a spectrum of colors, that while it doesn't look very realistic, it is still pretty cool looking. Everything else in the game like the soldiers, trees, and helicopters were pretty well done also. Animations weren't amazing, but they still were nice.

Audio
The sound in this game were pretty disappointing. There isn't really a lot to talk about regarding the audio in this game, since there really isn't a whole lot of it. There is no background music and the sound effects are pretty sparse. With the great theme music of the television show, you would think that they could have incorporated that somehow.

Controls
I often don't talk about the controls in Atari 2600 games, however, I feel that this game is worth mentioning. The controls are pretty solid and easy to understand, but I found out that navigating through the forests to retrieve the soldiers is not an easy task. I felt that the trees were too closely placed in order to navigate really easily.

Game Play/Replay Value
The game play in this game doesn't really impress me that much. There aren't many bad things I can say about the game play, other than that it doesn't really keep me occupied for long and gets boring quite fast. The game is also a little frustrating since it's hard to move through the forests, and avoid fire from the enemy tank at the same time. I wouldn't say this game has much replay value; there are many better choices than this for the Atari 2600.

Final Words
I wouldn't say that this is a bad game, and I would probably even say that this game is worth purchasing if you come across it. However, the controls are a little shoddy and the game play just has something missing from it. This game is mildly entertaining.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/08/06