Asteroids

The Good
In the Seventies, Atari released a number of cracking games including Pong, Breakout, and Lunar Lander. They were simple and straight to the point. They continued this tradition with Asteroids. I didn’t experience the game when it first came out in the arcades (I was just born), nor was I able to get a copy of it for the various home systems it was ported to (I only had a Commodore 64). I only discovered it through emulation.

You control a ship that can rotate left and right across the screen, fire from the front, and thrust forward. Numerous asteroids float across the screen, and your job is to break them up. The physics are amazing; if you keep holding the fire button down, your ship will keep zipping across the screen for a long time until it eventually slows down and stops. Your ship can also hyperspace, where you are transported to a random location on screen. It is likely that you will appear on top of an asteroid, especially if there are too many asteroids on the screen.

The asteroids wrap around the screen; when they go off the top edge, they re-appear at the bottom. This means that if you are close to the top or bottom, and you’re not paying any attention to your surroundings, then chances are your ship will be killed. I have noticed that if you do lose a life, your ship will not respawn if there are too many asteroids floating in the same spot; rather it waits until an area is clear of them.

When I played the original arcade version through MAME, I felt that when you fire upon one of the asteroids, the projectiles are very faint and you can’t see where they hit. This has been rectified in the Atari 2600 version. In my opinion, this version is superior to the arcade’s. For a start, there are sixty-six variations. Some of them let you use a shield instead of hyperspace, or face 180 degrees, allowing you to immediately fire upon an asteroid from behind. Then there’s the Deluxe variant. With the shield variation, it is designed to protect you while the asteroids float across your ship. Any more than five seconds, and your ship is destroyed.

One difficulty switch (in the “A” position) enables a blue flying saucer to appear and fire pot shots at you as it makes its way across the screen. Either it takes no notice of its surroundings, crashing into an asteroid, or it fires an accurate shot. If you make it to the later stages, you will be able to meet his little green brother who appears more frequently and is more accurate.

I am not a fan of Atari’s commercial for the game. An annoying, robotic voice I can hardly understand drowns out the dialogue between the actors. From what I can tell, the man of the spaceship went for a treasure hunt somewhere on Earth and managed to find a copy of Asteroids, which he returns to the spaceship to play with his children. They play for hours, to the point where his wife eventually gets so pissed off that she hurls a bowl of fruit at the TV screen. One positive thing I can say about this ad is that what you see and hear on the TV screen is what you’ll get.

The Bad
Why are the asteroids in different colors rather than just hollow like in the arcade version? This applies to all systems as well, not just the Atari 2600 version. Also, users who got the first revision of the machine or the Atari 2600 Jr. are unable to make use of this difficulty, since there is no such thing as a difficulty switch. Eric Schwartz’s “Asteroids Arcade” unofficial hack fixes both of these problems.

The Bottom Line
There is only one word to describe Asteroids: timeless. It can be played when you get home from work and feel like having a blast. If you love those classic Eighties shoot-em-ups, then give this game a try.

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.

The Good
For one of Atari's earliest offerings, this was a surprisingly accurate recreation of the classic arcade title.

This version of Asteroids was different in two significant ways: Its vibrant colors for the asteroids, and its unrelenting Jaws-like "dun dun" music. Oddly enough, when I think of this classic title, the 2600 version usually surpasses the arcade as my first thought that comes to mind.

The game controls well. If you can do it in the arcade, it can be done here.

The Bad
Extra men can be earned every 5,000 points. While this may bother some, the game becomes more of an endurance test than skill in some ways. Can the player reach the next bonus life before the asteroids crush the ship again?

The game also has a tendency to respawn directly in front of an asteroid at times, meaning an instant death. The plus side is that's it's one less asteroid to contend with.

The Bottom Line
As mentioned, this is my default memory of Atari's classic game. As a shooter, it accurately recreates the arcade game's feel, and has become my preferred version over the years.

The game was released when the "Arcade comes home" concept was still an amazing possibility. From Atari's lavishly illustrated covers of the time, to the little black cart that held player cred over your friends and family to get the highest score possible, it was a fun time in the living room, and one of the few cartridges I actually still own.

Does it still hold up today? Microsoft recently released it for their "Game Room" on the Xbox, and the "dun dun" music put me back into an old "competitive mode, determined to crush a whole new generation of gamers. It's still a fun title, and the design, and the funk 1970's-early 1980's style colors really took me back to a different time.

Fun, simple, basic, and addicting. The true hallmark of a classic game.