Sky Diver (Atari 2600)

While my hopes of finding an enjoyable Human Cannonball game were dashed by Atari’s attempt to adapt it for their console, the more traditional bucket list item of skydiving seems to have fared a little better.

Sky Diver starts off swift and snappy, planes entering the screen from the right and the left. One is green, the other red, and the one containing your diver is determined by whether you are player 1 or player 2, although you can play Sky Diver on your own if you just want to do a personal score challenge. As the plane flies from one side of the screen to the other, you press a button to make your leap and start plummeting to the ground fairly quickly. Your goal is to hit a designated segment of the ground, and thankfully, you can do a little course correction as you drop. To ensure you don’t just end up a puddle on the ground, you’ll need to open your parachute before it’s too late, and when the parachute is out, it’s a bit easier to guide your diver around in the air. Once they land, if they hit the target area, you will get some points based on how close to the ground you were before you opened your parachute for the landing. If you miss the landing pad though, you will lose points instead, meaning that you can’t sacrifice accuracy in your attempts to get the maximum amount of points you can get from a single jump: 11.

Each round of play is over fairly quickly, and once 9 jumps have been made, the game will come to an end. So far, things sound fairly simple, and that is probably one of Sky Diver’s strengths. It’s quick, easy to understand, and your consideration for each jump is based mostly on where the landing pad happens to be that round. There are a few complicating factors, an omnipresent one being the direction of the wind as indicated by a flag at the bottom of the screen.  When you open your parachute, you are going to have battle with the wind to stay on course, but it’s not too strong to lead to major upsets. If you push against the direction of the wind you float straight down, and since the plane is always guaranteed to have to travel half the screen before your landing pad is reached, you can have time to consider how to integrate it into your drop path. It’s a factor that helps things avoid being overly straightforward, and that is helped along even more by the game’s modes.

Depending on which mode you pick, Sky Diver’s landing pads will change. The most basic form is a decently sized target area that changes position with each jump, but there are modes where it moves back and forth, where it’s smaller than usual, and a mode where you and the other diver share a central pad in a mode billing itself as a game of Chicken. Coupled with wind considerations and the general speed of the game, the mode variations allows Sky Diver to maintain its formula fairly well. The player has a short bit of time to consider the current factors and has to drop quickly to ensure they can guide themselves properly, and even after all that, they have to balance the higher points of more dangerous play with the safety of opening the chute early. Rounds aren’t just a cut and dry success/failure situation because of this, and it’s not that hard to land a few 11s that can motivate a player to try and get a better total across the nine jumps. The shifting factors ensure that goal isn’t too easy, but at the same time, you’re still doing a fairly basic drop despite the variables that change with each round.

Adding another human to the mix does allow the competitive angle of nine consecutive jumps seem a touch more interesting and the game makes sure the landing pads are perfect mirrors of each other to make things almost fair. The wind will still effect each player different depending on if they’re on the right or left, but you end up with the trade-off that a wind might favor you more one round and favor the opponent more the other. The more disappointing aspect of multiplayer though is that your presence does not really effect the other player. You’re just playing at the same time in 4 of the 5 modes, but in Chicken at least it’s about being the first player to hit the landing pad, the loser not getting any points even if they also land on it successfully. Chicken is probably the least interesting alteration on your own due to the static target position, but it makes up for it by having a two-player mode where you can actually affect the results in more ways than just performing well. There’s even a handicap option available for all modes by way of the difficulty switches, meaning that a less skilled player can jump from a slower plane or both players can take the more relaxed planes to make things a potentially closer match.

THE VERDICT: Skydiving is an act more about the incredible sensation it evokes than any real goal or objective, but Sky Diver introduces the right amount of video game elements to make it a decent time on the Atari 2600.  Having to quickly consider where the landing pad is and which direction the wind is blowing makes each round feel different, and it’s not too hard to figure out how to put your daredevil on the right path. Having to consider when to activate your parachute adds a touch more depth to the drop, but even if you play against another human player, Sky Diver is pretty much a series of simple start-and-stop rounds that only asks enough of the player to be mildly entertaining.

And so, I give Sky Diver for the Atari 2600…

An OKAY rating. Quick repetition is probably what wounds Sky Diver the most. A bit more time to the actual drop and a bit more of a fight with elements like wind speed would make individual drops more tense instead of short do-or-die scenarios. The snappiness is certainly its own kind of strength as nothing sits too long in Sky Diver, but rapid fire rounds also means you’re only given a small burst of gameplay to interact with that only requires a little consideration to execute properly. Two-player Chicken and the modes with landing pads that move back and forth can have more round diversity at least, so the game on the whole mostly just suffers a longevity issue since you can squeeze out most of the content in a short sitting. A round’s possible points caps at 11 and the total point count is capped at 99, so you’ll likely know after a few plays if you have any hope of scraping that top score and disengage fairly easy if you don’t like your chances. Still, the individual drops are a light bit of quick action that is easy to pick up and play if you’re looking for a quick amusement.

Sky Diver gives you a decent challenge across its five modes, but the gameplay could almost be described as lawn darts with a sky-diving coat of point. “Drop the thing in the right place to earn points.” Sky Diver isn’t quite that simple of course, but its appeal is closer to that lawn game than it is the incredible sensation of real life skydiving.