Asteroids

The Good
Asteroids is a classic fixed-screen shooter released in late 1979, and the object is to take chunks out of asteroids before they destroy your ship. Like many of Atari’s games, several home ports were made for the company's own machines. Not one computer received an official port of the game, so it was up to small companies – such as Silversoft – to produce clones of the original game.

This version is called Meteor, and it is faithful to Atari’s game. Like other ZX81 games I have played, the front cover is well designed, and it has instructions telling the player the story and the control configuration. The latter is repeated in the game in case the owner of the game happens to lose the cover.

The machine was incapable of producing good graphics, so your ship is made up of different letters, symbols, and graphic characters. For example, there is no equivalent of a ^ symbol on a ZX81 keyboard, so the programmer had to make do with the letter A. Regardless, I could tell everything apart, and the author has drawn the asteroids to closely resemble those in the arcade version.

The Bad
Hmmm…

The Bottom Line
This is a good clone of Asteroids for the ZX81, and the only clone for the machine I know. Anyone without a 16K expansion pack will be unable to play the game It may contain blocky graphics and no sound, but that is the limitation of the machine. Silversoft should have waited for the Spectrum to come out so that it could program the game with sound and much crisper graphics.