Battlezone was nowhere near as fun as Activision’s ripoff of it, Robot Tank.
And don’t blow in it. Your saliva will help corrode the contacts.
You’ve got some of my personal favorites but no one has mentioned Pitfall II yet so I might as well be the first one. It’s a forerunner of the large exploration games and well worth checking out. An absolutely brilliant bit of design especially considering the limited resources on a 2600.
Grr… on review someone beat me to it…
And may I brag about solving Raiders of the Lost Ark? It is a painfully annoying game so I don’t recommend it but I did finish it.
My favorites are Defender, Joust, and adventure. Raiders is difficult, but I always liked it.
I used to have a game called Cake Walk. I picked it up in a junk bin after the crash. It was pretty lame, you were on a cake assembly line and had to grab and stack the pieces on the moving line. Extremely difficult. I don’t remember what happened to the cartridge but a few years back I found an atari web sites that listed the game as rarity: never released.
Damn I wish I still had that.
Favorites were Pitfall, Yars Revenge, Megalomania, and Enduro.
I beat Raiders of the Lost Ark 2 different ways. There was a bit at the end where the player was raised up on a platform or something, the height of which was determined by which method you used to get through the game. I think this was the first game with different endings. One of them involved trading something to the black market guy, which allowed you to skip a big section of the game, but I can’t remember exactly how it was done. Neither of my endings got me very high up on the platform at the end, and I always wondered what else you could do in the game. Hmmm, I think I’m going to try to find out…
Chopper Command and Stampede - Activision at it’s finest 
I always preferred Activision’s Starmaster over Star Raiders; Raiders had that clunky extra control box, and I didn’t like the heads-up display. Starmaster was pure shootin’ fun.
Pitfall 2 was fun, too.
Wasn’t Chase the Chuckwagon a mail-in giveaway? I didn’t think it came with an actual box and such. Anyway, I’ve played it on an actual 2600 console; some friends of mine in college got into flea markets and picked up loads of vintage gaming stuff. In addition to CtC, they found a rare copy of “Pigs In Space”.
I picked up another six.
I got Barnstorming, Canyon Bomber, Dig Dug, Star Raiders, Superman, and Video Pinball. I’ve only played them a little since I got them. I didn’t have the manual, so when I tried Superman I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve since got JPEGs or Text files of the manuals from AtariAge, so I’m set there. Canyon Bomber seems familiar, I think one of my friends had that.
Star Raiders, I should have looked at the cartridge label, since I don’t have a keyboard. I’m thinking I could make something usable, if I can find schematics.
Q*Bert! One of my all-time favorites.
Also, Surround, but only if you have someone to play with. Playing against the computer is completely lame. It makes the same moves every time.
Yeah, my mom’s still works, too. I always play when I go over to her place. The NES is not feeling so well, though.