Beamrider

Beamrider's gameplay is solid and the stages gradually increase in intensity. There are two difficulty levels, and the harder one is no joke.

In this second-rate Tempest, you control a cannon at the bottom of a moving grid in space. The blue grid looks attractive, but mainly serves as eye candy. Your cannon can hop between five beams, attempting to shoot 15 scaling aliens while dodging indestructible meteors. In addition to your normal shot, you also have a reserve of long-range torpedoes. Be sure to save one or two of these for the mother ship, which creeps slowly across the top of the screen at the end of each round. The audio effects are very nice, reminding me of an Alien movie. But despite high marks for presentation and control, the gameplay is barely average. There's not much in the way of strategy and the action gets repetitive.

Your basic shooting range only extends three-quarters of the screen, but you also have a limited supply of "bombs" that can reach the edge of the horizon. Be sure to save a bomb or two for the end-of-round "boss" ship that slowly hovers across the top of the screen. Although small, the aliens scale in and out nicely, and some of the audio effects have a cool reverberating quality. The control isn't too bad, although the Atari 5200 joystick doesn't allow for concise side-to-side movement. You can hold in the fire button to constantly fire, and thank God for that! With three levels of challenge, Beamrider isn't a bad little game, but you'll probably forget about it as soon as you turn it off.

This is a very 'old' game ... and it shows! The different behaviour displayed by the nasties and the hectic pace of the game on the higher levels make this a reasonable 'zap and blast' game. It does however, have rather a short-lived appeal.