Asteroids

aka: Asteroids (AsterĂłides), Meteorlar Geliyor
Moby ID: 8872
Arcade Specs
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Description official descriptions

Play the role of a spaceship pilot trapped in a gigantic asteroid cloud and pulverize incoming asteroids with the ship's photon cannon. When all asteroids are destroyed, the player can then move on to the next round. In addition to the asteroids, the player will also face an Alien Robot Saucer which shoots randomly across the screen.

The player using the controller may rotate the ship (left or right) in any direction or move the ship forward. Shots will be fired according to the ship's direction. The player has three reserved ships available to replace a destroyed spaceship. The spaceship is destroyed if an asteroid collides with the spaceship or is shot by an Alien Robot Saucer. Additionally, the player may opt to use the hyperspace warp to avoid a collision. The warp, however, may also destroy the spaceship in the process.

Asteroids when shot will break up into smaller pieces or be destroyed. There are three types of asteroids: large asteroids, medium asteroids, and small asteroids. Large asteroids and medium asteroids when shot will break up into two smaller sized asteroids. Small asteroids when shot will be destroyed.

Alien Robot Saucers come in two sizes: small and large. Both use photon lasers to shoot and will explode when destroyed. Alien Robot Saucers will not appear at the Novice Level.

Game Difficulty and Variations

There are 4 available difficulty settings: Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Expert.

The game also offers three different game variations:

  • Standard Play - For one or two players, taking turns when a player's ship is destroyed.

  • Competition Asteroids - Two players appear on the screen at the same time. Friendly fire is in affect, which means shots fired from one player's spaceship will destroy the other player's spaceship. Each player has separate ship reserves.

  • Team Asteroids - Two players on the screen at the same time. Friendly fire is disabled, which means shots fired from one player's spaceship will not destroy the other player's spaceship and just pass through. Ship reserves for both players are combined.

Scoring

The score of the Player 1 is viewable on the upper left side of the screen, while Player 2 on the opposite upper right side. A player will be awarded a new reserve ship for every 10,000 points.

  • Small saucer - 1,000 points
  • Other player's ship - 500 points
  • Large saucer - 200 points
  • Small asteroid - 100 points
  • Medium asteroid - 50 points
  • Large asteroid - 20 points

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Credits (Arcade version)

Developed by
Project Engineer

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 75% (based on 23 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.4 out of 5 (based on 121 ratings with 8 reviews)

Great game. One of the only games I have worth playing on the emulators.

The Good
It just keeps going on, and you get another life every 5,000 points you get. Your not stuck in the middle or just on one line, like other games.

The Bad
Hard to beat.

The Bottom Line
Great game. Definitely one to buy if you own and still play your Atari 2600!

Atari 2600 · by Alex K. (3) · 2003

Addictive and fun title, which shines in simplicity.

The Good
I was born in 1985, so Asteroids kind of went by me. As did the Atari 2600 as a whole. My first real experiences with the 2600 can be pinpointed to the months before The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was released. I had run out of recently released games to play and had come with the marvelous idea to download an Atari 2600 emulator and have some fun with that.

And fun I had! Though it shines in simplicity and you are blasting away in space with ease in seconds, beating the game was quite a challenge. It was, however, the only Atari game I ever had the dedication for to beat! The premises is simple, just shoot asteroids and don't let them hit me, but it can get really intense.

I really liked the sounds in this game. And that's saying something, because for the most part I found the sounds that my emulator produced horrible and nauseating.

The Bad
Later I played the original Asteroids using MAME and I must say that the original version is (not surprisingly) superior, due to the minimal capabilities of the 2600 system. The new bitmap graphics do give it a nice distinct feeling, but everything feels smaller and more crowded.

After a while the game gets rather repetitive and boring. Some variations in the waves would have been welcome. But with the Atari you can't have high demands like that, I guess.

The Bottom Line
Asteroids is fun! You get to blow stuff up in space! You'll get tired of it after a while, but not without having your share of fun. In my opinion it's one of the better titles of the system. But that's a retrospective opinion of someone who missed the first age of video games.

Atari 2600 · by vedder (70685) · 2014

If you are seriously reading reviews to consider buying this game or not, truly humanity has lost all hope.

The Good
Somewhere deep inside my brain there is an impulse that constantly tells me that if I want to play a classic “arcade” game that I need to go back to the very first manifestation of a game on a home console in order to get the most "authentic" experience. That is to say, in order to get the closest to the original game, I think that I need to find the earliest known version of that game and play it.

The Bad
Unfortunately, this impulse is seldom intuitive, and as such I am beginning to believe that, like my appendix, that part of my brain has lost most of it medical value and should be removed. For one thing must be understood about early console games that will give you a good understanding of why our parents were so respectful of arcades way back when. Porting “good” arcade games during the dawn of the console era was more often than not counter-productive and anti-progressive. One look at the arcade version and Atari version of Pac-man will give you a good idea of how almost all early “ports” back in the day unfolded. Old video game systems were simply not powerful enough to carry over the sleek graphics and tight controls of the arcade cabinets which make them so addicting.

Now if someone at the very start of the era of home-consoles started an anti-porting campaign to keep classic arcades open, Asteroids would probably be one of the poster-boys of this front. Asteroids suffers the typical maladies that came with early porting, from loss of controls to bad graphics.

As I turned on the game, I was unimpressed with the eye candy they gave me. The sleek, green, well-defined asteroids of the arcade had been replaced with pixilated, multi-colored diarrhea chunks floating around the screen. However, I soon realized that “floating” was somewhat of a misnomer, and I decided that “drifting vertically” was more precise, as that was what they all the asteroids did. At the start of each level, the asteroids only moved vertically, never horizontally or diagonally.

But wait, there’s more! I soon noticed the glaring lack of asteroids that reappeared in the center at the beginning of each level. I soon realized that the programmers were too lazy to come up with an asteroid generating system that did not spawn asteroids on top of you, and instead only chose to spawn them at the side of the levels to cover up their laziness. So at the start of each level I was faced with two vertically shifting strips of asteroids to the left and right of me, while I sat with my cute little space ship in the cold, empty center.

But lo, the geniuses forgot to take into account what might happen if you beat and level and you’re of to the side of the level instead of in the center. Your ship position does not reset to the center at the beginning of each round, and there’s no system stopping asteroids from spawning on top of you, meaning guaranteed death should you finish a level with your ship on in the center of the level.

What finally broke my patience was the fact that for some reason on my last life, my game froze and turned a dull shade of crap brown, which I finally accepted as appropriate considering that’s what I thought of the game after my experience.


The Bottom Line
There is truly a lesson to be learned from all of this, and that is the fact that if you really want to revisit your childhood and play some classic arcade games then just look for a free flash version on the GOD DAMN INTERNET. Seriously, if you can’t sleep at night knowing that you could be playing hours of your favorite classic video game, Asteroids, then don’t pull an all out effort trying to get the possibly unholiest of all its ports. In fact, what is truly sad is the fact that you possibly needed to read this review to tell you not to buy it, as if you were somehow debating whether this would be a worthy investment up until you read my enlightening opinion of it. Seriously, close this window right now. You’re wasting precious minutes of your life reading this quite pointless review.

Atari 2600 · by Matt Neuteboom (976) · 2008

[ View all 8 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
free browser version Rola (8485) Jan 26, 2014

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The Arcade version of Asteroids appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Atari 7800

Asteroids was one of the "Fabulous Eleven" launch games for the Atari 7800.

Controls

The original Asteroids arcade control scheme (five buttons, no joystick) is identical to the configuration employed in the early PDP-1 Spacewar! implementation.

References

Internally at Atari the two flavours of UFO in Asteroids (slow and fast) were referred to as "Mr. Bill" and "Sluggo", after characters in Saturday Night Live skits. After this was disclosed in an interview, Atari was sent a cease-and-desist letter by NBC's lawyers.

References to the game

Asteroids was popular enough to have a song inspired by it on the full-length Pac-Man Fever album: Hyperspace.

Technology

The original Coin-Op game of Asteroids in the arcade machines contained 4 kilobytes of code and 4 kilobytes of graphic data. Programmers managed to squeeze it in to 1 kilobyte of data for the Atari 2600!

Information also contributed by PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual, Scott Monster and FatherJack.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Servo.

Game Boy added by Patrick Bregger. Xbox 360, Windows added by Alaka. Atari 8-bit added by ZZip. Antstream added by lights out party. Arcade added by The cranky hermit.

Additional contributors: Guy Chapman, Echidna Boy, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack, firefang9212.

Game added April 12, 2003. Last modified March 23, 2024.