...and now, I play the game without commentary. Enjoy!
Seaquest is one of quite a few games published and developed by Activision for the Atari 2600. In this game, you control a yellow submarine with the joystick and fire at sharks and submarines while rescuing divers.
The joystick lets you move in eight directions, while the fire button lets you fire shots at enemies. You will have an oxygen meter at the bottom, and you will have to surface if you need to refill. When you are surfaced and refilling oxygen, you cannot move back down until your oxygen meter is completely full. This can be a pain in later levels, for once you make enough progress, there will be a surface sub that will move from right to left every so often, and if it runs into you, you're losing a life. It will help if you can get behind them and then surface, as that will give you more time to get out and then back in before the surface sub returns.
With the difficulty switch at B/Novice, the bullets will fire faster. At A/Expert, the bullets will fire more slowly. Bullets will move upwards and downwards with you regardless of what you have the difficulty switch set to.
Fish will swim at you in packs of up to three. While you can easily shoot them down, sometimes they will be chasing divers. You can save the blue divers by shooting the sharks and running into the divers, but if you shoot at the divers too much, they will swim in the opposite direction. Sometimes you will see divers swimming on their own, but they will be chased by the sharks sooner or later. When you save six divers, you can surface to get a bunch of bonus points and go on to the next level. Keep in mind that if you surface to refill your air before you save six divers, you'll lose one of your divers. You will also lose a diver if you lose a life.
Submarines will fire at you, and they will fire at you. If you can get around and behind them in a case of silent running, you can shoot them down for a ton of points.
When you complete a level, you'll get a lot of points for each diver you've rescued and how much oxygen you have level at the end, and the more levels you've completed, the bigger the amount of points you will get will become. You can get an extra life at every 10,000 points, but as you play through the game, the sharks and the subs will get faster and faster, and those extra lives can be spent pretty quickly.
All in all, this is a fun game from Activision that can be played with one or two players. While there are no other game modes and the difficulty switches only change the speed of the bullets, there is plenty of fast, frantic, albeit repetitive moving and shooting action, and you'll be racking up a ton of points once you figure out what to do and seeing just how far you can go. Activision made plenty of arcade-style games for the Atari 2600, and this is one of the good ones.
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