Asteroids

The Good
Activision's new Asteroids still plays like the original, but the graphics and sound are more current. Although it's still mostly you against the rocks, there's now a variety of asteroid types and enemy ship types. This game requires all the fast reflexes of the original. If you hesitate, you will likely die.

The Bad
The game is a little too complicated. In the original, it was rotate right, rotate left, thrust, fire, and for emergencies, hyperspace. Now you have all those, plus shields and "flip," which instantly flips your ship 180 degrees. While they're all interesting features, there's just a few too many buttons for me to think about when I've got five asteroids and a UFO coming at me from six different directions.

Then there's the power-ups: all 16 of them. Thirteen of those are "wildcard weapons" that you can use to help destroy stuff. That's all well and good, but it's hard to remember which is which, particularly when they all tend to look alike. Granted, there's never more than one or two per level, but I don't want to pause my game just to see if it's a weapon I might like.

The Bottom Line
This is an intense action game, just like the original. Each zone starts fairly easy, but the final levels of each are tough. Add to that the number of buttons and different power-ups to keep track of and you have a game that's probably not for beginners. Thirty-somethings who were kids when the original coin-op came out 20 years ago may be able to keep up, but fifty-somethings who were thirty-somethings then might have a hard time.

The Good
This updated version of the infamous Asteroids is, in my opinion, a great update of a tried-and-true game.

The graphics, even in it's software driven mode, are spectacular. Burning suns, eerie black holes, and other items in the background are just amazing to see.

The gameplay is solid, with plenty of power-ups (15+) that have some amazing effects. Lasers, guided bombs, proximity mines, ramming shields (a personal favorite), and a plethora (hey a vocab word!) of other weapons.

The sound is top-notch, great effects for the laser blasts and the breaking apart of the asteroids.

The programmers including a version of the Original Asteroids is great. Sometimes playing the new one is too much... Playing the simpler version is actually more fun on some days.

The Bad
The graphics are dark. And brown asteroids on black background are very hard to aim at. The best way to play the game is at night with no lights on... At least that way you can see all the objects moving around.

The Bottom Line
Retro-gamers, rejoice! This is a great update to a classic game. And they even got it right.