Genre: Shooter

Shooters are games built around aiming and firing: you move a cannon, tank or diver and shoot at targets before they reach you. On the Atari 2600 this was a natural fit. The joystick moves you and the single fire button shoots, and the console’s graphics chip even has built-in “missile” objects, small moving dots that programmers used for bullets and laser shots.
The hardware also sets limits. The chip offers just two missiles and two player sprites per line, and there are only 128 bytes of RAM, so a 2600 shooter usually keeps the number of shots and enemies on screen low.
A few games in this list:

Worm War I (20th Century Fox, 1982): drive a tank up the screen and blast giant worms as blocks and worms move down towards you.
Action Force (Parker Brothers, 1983): the British version of G.I. Joe: Cobra Strike, in which you defend a training camp against a giant enemy robot.
Aquaventure (Atari, 1983): an unreleased game in which a diver with a spear gun hunts for treasure in an undersea cave before the air runs out.
Base Attack (Home Vision, 1983): a role reversal, where you fly a UFO and bomb the cities below while they fire back.
Astrowar (Goliath, 1983): shoot falling stars, spinning bombs and space monsters as the pace picks up with your score. A US version is also on the site.

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