First up on the list is Astrosmash, an Intellivision(I'll get into Intellivision's superiority over Atari 2600 in another post) game that was originally called Avalanche but was changed to take advantage of the space game surge. It was one of the more popular games for the Intellivision, and for good reason. It was addictive, easy to learn, and had a perfect difficulty curve. You basically moved your cannon back and forth along the ground, getting points for each rock that you destroyed. 10 points for big rocks, 20 points for small rocks. For each rock you missed, you got deducted the same amount. Sound simple? Sure. But as you scored more, the pace would quicken, the background beat would quicken,(a simple thump...thump...thump) and the background would change colors. Every time the background changed colors, a new feature would be introduced, up to 100,000. Some of the additions were UFOs that would shoot down cluster-bullets, those were easy for a bunch of points, and my hated nemesis, heatseeking missiles. The heat seekers would follow you around once they hit the ground, and you'd have to use your hyperspace to get out of the way, and even that was a gamble, as it might put you in the path of a rock, or worse. The ultimate enemy for this game, though, were the spinners. If the spinners hit the ground, you were dead. No ifs, ands, or buts. You were dead. Sometimes there'd be 3 spinners on the screens in the higher levels. The good news was that every 1000 points, you'd get an extra life, and when the multiplier was up on 6x or greater, they came quickly. Unfortunately, they would go quickly, and Astrosmash penalized you points for dieing, too, so you'd have to re-accumulate those points, AND an additional 1000 points to keep getting new guys.
I remember getting somewhere in the upper 190,000s on this game, but my brother, being my older brother, needed to beat that, and I still remember his high score of 380,000 or so. I was amazed, for the screen was whipping by, and he was playing very smoothly, carving out a hole for his little cannon in the middle of the screen, making sure that no spinners got by, or when they were unreachable, he made sure he didn't get killed by a rock trying to race over to get them. That was always my downfall, trying to get the spinners, getting killed by a rock, then getting killed by the spinner that I was trying to get over to. 2 deaths instead of 1.
Apparently, there was a contest for this back in the day, and some kid won $25,000 in early 80s money for getting 825,000 points in an hour. That's impressive.
