While there may never be a consensus on the "best ever" Atari 2600 game, Solaris easily claims the title of "most technically impressive," and could very well be considered "best ever." A space battler developed by Star Raiders guru Douglas Neubauer, Solaris pushes the 2600 to its absolute limits, using every ounce of CPU, every scrap of memory and every bit of Neubauer's experience to bring a galaxy full of good guys, bad guys and natural wonders, all waiting for you to explore and conquer. The feats of Solaris seem even more miraculous given they were done without any extra memory or other such hardware inside the cartridge, just lots of well-written code for a well-designed game. This is one of the Atari 2600 catalog's essentials.
Grade: A+.