Summary
Combat - Only Less
The Good
With two players this game can be fun for awhile. A few of the variations add game-changing features.
The Bad
Poor graphics and sound. Nothing very exciting about this cart. Combat offers similar gameplay with more variety and more fun.
The Bottom Line
This game is purportedly based on the grandfather of all video games, Spacewar! Not having ever seen, much less played, Spacewar!, I can neither verify nor deny the assertion. The game is, however, quite rudimentary. You control a small triangle, your spaceship, and, depending on the game variation, either try to shoot the other triangle or try to run into a moving sprite, a "docking module." Different settings allow you to refuel and rearm at a centrally located sprite, the "Starbase," or to be gravitationally drawn toward a centrally located sprite, the "Space Sun," that will destroy your ship.
Gameplay can actually be quite speedy by Atari 2600 standards (indeed, you can speed up so much that you become unable to fire missiles) and quite challenging due to the somewhat unusual controls. (Pressing up on the joystick accelerates your ship, pressing left or right rotates the ship's heading, down makes your ship disappear.)
Between Spacewar!'s early 1960's birth and Atari's introduction of this game in 1978, clearly games had improved in variety, complexity and appearance. Space War, however, demonstrates very little of that improvement. The graphics are a rather poor effort, only a step above ASCII, and the sound is nearly nonexistent.
The gameplay is similar to Combat, but without the variety that added so much to the Combat experience. In this game, instead of different vehicles battling on different battlefields, you have two triangles battling on a blank screen. While the variations that add a gravitational sun do provide some variety, this is not nearly enough to justify Space War's existence.
The best feature of this game is, in my opinion, its speed. With this cart you can send your ship zipping out-of-control across the screen, shooting wildly. No Atari 2600 game to this point had allowed this sort of action. Unfortunately, simple game speed and a moderately inventive variation isn't enough to make this game any more than temporarily amusing.
As a note, if you look carefully you might just see a familiar friend from Asteroids in this game. (Hint: he's a triangle.)
