Developed and published by Atari, Inc. in 1983, the Atari 5200 conversion of Moon Patrol is an adequate, but hardly ‘dazzling’, port of the classic Irem arcade game.

It features five levels, each split into five sections, with waypoints in-between (so that if you lose a life you can continue from the last waypoint).

The aim is to survive for as long as possible, by jumping over craters, and by blasting rocks and attacking aliens (who drop bombs down onto you, which you must avoid).

The scrolling backgrounds aren’t bad, but the expanded moon buggy sprite is pretty ugly. Most importantly, though, the gameplay is quite decent. While it’s not quite up to the same standard as the arcade original, it is playable, and not too difficult to make progress in – at least on the lowest difficulty setting (there are two difficulties in the Atari 5200 version). The game even has some background music, which was quite rare in early console games.

A homebrew ‘Redux‘ version of this game was released in 2019, and better demonstrates what the Atari 5200 is capable of.

More: Moon Patrol on Wikipedia
More: Moon Patrol on YouTube