Halo 2600 Reviews

Wow...That’s really all I can say in regards to Halo 2600, a homebrew game developed by Ed Fries and released in limited quantities in 2010. I suppose I should start by stating that I’ve never been a huge Halo fan. I’ll never say that they’re bad, but I’ve never really been reeled in by a Halo game. I almost find it odd that the official games in the series could never really captivate me, yet this unlicensed, homebrew, 4-bit game sucked me in to the point where I wanted to keep playing until I beat the game. Who would’ve known that a 4-bit, pixelated Master Chief would be my favorite version of them all?

When you start Halo 2600, you’re unarmed. Unless you find a gun, you’ll likely find yourself to be dead rather quickly. Luckily, once you know where to find the first gun, you’re good to go. Once you’re equipped with some firepower, you quickly see that this game is going to be fun, as you dance around enemy fire while attempting to fire shots off of your own at moving targets. While doing this, you may be lucky and have an enemy drop a shield power-up. Normally, one shot kills you, but after picking up the shield power-up, you’re able to withstand an extra bullet, which is essential to defeating the game, especially towards the end.



You’ll also need to find keys laying about in order to progress to the next area, so you’ll be doing some minor exploration while attempting to find them. This exploration will also help you find some firepower and/or a nifty pair of boots that boosts your speed significantly, which is very much needed to ensure victory. If you manage to battle your way through the various terrain (like an icy area, where your character slides a bit if you try to stop) and increasingly-difficult-to-pass enemies, including some wearing stealth cammo, you’ll find yourself face-to-face with the final boss, a giant space ship that fires three beams at once while it bounces up and down in the screen. Beat the boss, and you’re rewarded by starting the game over, except you’ve got about half the speed as before, and touching walls will kill you, making the difficulty significantly greater than your previous playthrough.

This game is just a blast when compared to other Atari 2600 games. While it may not reach the greatness of a Pitfall! or match the simplistic, competitive fun of Combat, I honestly believe that Halo 2600 is among the absolute best Atari 2600 games ever made. Even after beating it, I wanted to keep playing, it’s honestly that good. For the hardware that this game was developed for, and the limited amount of space allowed for the game to fit on a cartridge, Halo 2600 is absolutely amazing. If E.T. would have ended up similar to this game, I doubt that there ever would have been a video game crash back in ‘82.



Now, with all the praising, I do have a few negatives that I can point out. The first being the bullets. The bullets of you and your enemies can sometimes blend into the background, making it difficult to dodge enemy attacks. Also worth noting about enemy bullets is that they can travel through objects like trees, while your bullets cannot. I liked this, as I felt it added the need to run around and dodge enemy attacks rather than simply ‘shoot, shoot, shoot,’ however, I can see some folks getting frustrated with this despite my like for it. My only other gripe is the larger enemies you encounter towards the end of the game. They’re almost too easy to dispose of, since they’re a larger target. Maybe if these giants could withstand more than one bullet, it would help continue with the increasing difficulty that the game has up to that point. But, these are minor gripes and aren’t major enough to prevent your enjoyment of this game.

Graphically, Halo 2600 is done very well. It’s very simple, but you’re also able to tell what is what with ease. As I stated before, the bullets sometimes blend in with the backgrounds, so perhaps a little more toying with the color schemes may have helped this game, but for the most part, everything is pretty nice-looking, given the hardware it runs on. As far as audio goes, there’s a nice little jingle at the title screen, but aside from that, the only other audio that you’ll hear are sound effects. The sound effects consist of the normal bloops and bleeps found in most video games of the early-80's. So, on the audio end of things, nothing too spectacular, but it still gets the job done.



Halo 2600 is one of those rare homebrew games that feels and plays like it would have been a gigantic hit had it been released back when the Atari 2600 was at its prime. It’s just an absolute blast to play and it blows most other 2600 games out of the water. Halo 2600 isn’t just what I hope for homebrew games to be like when I play them, but it’s what I hope for commercial games to be like, too. The Atari 2600 may be nearly 35 years old, but Halo 2600 proves that there’s still plenty of life to be found in the system if we get the right people developing for it.

(Note: I like to rate things on a 0.5 scale, so while I gave this a 10 here on Listal, I'd give it a 9.5 over on my site...Which I will whenever I get around to publishing this there.)