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Rush Hour
Ever been stuck in a traffic jam? Haven't you always wished you could just floor it and zip in and out of traffic, blowing up all the cars that were in your way? While you may not be able to do it in real life (not without a lengthy jail sentence anyway), here's one game that will let you live out your fantasy on the 2600. Rush Hour is one of the long lost Commavid games that everyone assumed existed somewhere. Not only was Rush Hour advertised in catalogs, but prototype boxes had already been produced hinting that the game was almost finished. Sadly Rush Hour, along with Underworld and Mission Omega never made it to store shelves before Commavid folded.
Rush Hour is a driving/action game similar to Spy Hunter, but
turned on its side. Your goal is to zip in and out of
traffic on a five lane highway, and destroy the five car
carriers that are causing the traffic jam. Your car comes
equipped with two laser headlights (they come standard with the
deluxe package), which you can use to shoot any cars that get in
your way. However once a car is destroyed it will turn
into a deadly pile of debris which cannot be destroyed.
You can avoid the debris by changing lanes, but since this
is rush hour finding an open space can be
difficult. Alternatively you can also burn cars to a
crisp with your red-hot exhaust, this is useful for those pesky
cars that like to sneak up behind you. On the road you'll
also see what appear to be oil slicks, but in this prototype the
code to handle them has been removed. This was due to the
programmer trying to make more space in the code while he was
debugging. The oil slicks are functional in earlier
prototypes and make your car move in a random direction (skid)
when hit but don't cause damage. 
As you zip in and out of traffic you'll undoubtedly get hit at least once. Thankfully your car is a lot tougher than it looks and won't be instantly destroyed (usually). However depending on the severity of the crash, your car will take some damage which will affect how it functions. The damage will be repaired over time, but you can also repair this damage by stopping on the top of the bottom of the road. However in the time it takes to repair your car, you may risk letting the carriers get away (as shown on the radar at the bottom of the screen). Keeping your car in top condition is vital as you only have one life in Rush Hour. Lose it and it's game over.
Once you've reached the carriers you must carefully watch and
shoot each one as it unloads its car. Before a carrier
unloads a car it will turn orange and flash briefly, it's during
this time you must shoot. As you're shooting the carriers
be careful to avoid the cars that are unloaded as crashing into
one will almost certainly result in your untimely demise.
One thing you may have noticed is that the carriers have a
rather odd shape. This is due to the graphics for the
carriers overlapping with the damaged car graphics which was
used to change their colors. When this bug is fixed they
look more like space ships than car carriers, so it is
unknown what they were exactly meant to be.
Although Rush Hour is playable, the prototype still has a
bunch of bugs that needed to fixed before it was released.
The most serious of these bugs is in the display routine,
which will cause the screen to jump unexpectedly from time to
time (especially when you reach the carriers) due to the
unstable scanline count. The prototype also has minor
graphic and sound glitches, a radar that isn't always accurate,
and nonfunctional oil slicks (as noted above). There's
also a bug that causes the speed of the enemy cars to basically
be the same when each car type should have a different range of
speed. For example the dragsters should have a higher top
and lower speed then the sedans making some more dangerous than
others. This bugged code explains an unusual feature still
in the game where your car and the enemy cars start
flashing when you're both going the exact same speed, causing
your car to explode if you don't speed up/slow down after a few
seconds. The idea behind this was to prevent the player
from just following behind a fast moving car (like a dragster)
and letting it clear the way to the carriers. 
Speaking of interesting bugs, there's a 'good one' still in the game that causes your car to get repaired past the normal limit when you stop at the top of the screen versus the bottom. This was due to the programmer confusing hexadecimal with decimal notation. The bottom of the screen repairs your car by 40 ($28) but the top repairs your car by 64! This is because the code has $40 instead of $28 for the top repair value. All these bugs are due to game being in the process of being debugged when the programmer was involved in a serious car accident (how's that for irony?). Due to this accident, Rush Hour was delayed and never completely finished.
Commavid was always known for their interesting games, and Rush Hour is no exception. Rush Hour was one of the first games Commavid not programmed in-house; instead it was contracted out to an independent programmer. It appears that Commavid was finally starting to make some headway towards becoming a larger player on the 2600 scene; unfortunately the market crash put an end to those dreams.
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