1) Firebreather

I've played better games, I've played worse games. Actually, I've played considerably more better than worse (most of those that fall in that 'worse' classification are also on Action 52) than Firebreather, but you know how that goes. In a way, this first Action 52 title sets the tone for the rest of the games found here: the difference between one stage and another is the difference between doing your business over a largely blue background instead of a mostly green one, press A to fire, incredibly faulty play controls (you can't move or shoot diagonally).

In other ways, though, Firebreather separates itself from the rest of the Action 52 crowd: For example, the background music you'd find in most games here, a simple, irritating but kinda catchy background tune consisting of variations of the same four-bars (the highlight of a typical Action 52 game), is completely missing as the audio score is pretty much completely reduced to the crappy, digitized breathing noises of the characters. It's also the only game on this thing that requires two players in order to function properly - the rest of the games have a two player option, but this is the only game for which that even makes a lick of sense. Of course, to its credit when two players are involved, the game does just that, function properly, and in this world of Action 52, that deserves some special recognition. It's a game where two dragons battle it out in the skies, by the way, a complete rip off of Combat for the Atari  2600.