Star Raiders

The Good
Given the limitations of early consoles like the 5200, Star Raiders was a pretty amazing game for its time that included quite a bit of detail and was still incredibly fun to play. Your goal is pretty much to destroy any enemies in the galaxy that you can find before they destroy your own starbases. The groups of enemies show up on your galactic chart, and attempt to surround and destroy your starbases so you'll need to complete your mission fast (especially on later levels). Whether you were looking at the galactic chart, flying through hyperspace, or in a battle all of the enemies were always on the move. Overall there is a large amount of freedom in the game to go where you want, when you want. You could (attempt) to leave battles if you were losing to go get your ship repaired, attack whichever cluster of enemies you wanted, or even visit empty space if you felt like it. Played from a first person point of view (impressive and uncommon on a 5200), you had the ability to control numerous aspects of your starship like shields, weapons, scanner, hyperdrive, and more. Really an astonishing array of actions; luckily the 5200 joystick actually worked quite well for this, even the often criticized analog stick didn't provide any obstacles to playing the game. An overlay was included for the 12 button keypad which controlled most functions. Having these right on the joystick (and labeled clearly) was nice, especially when compared with other platforms where the computer keyboard or a separate keypad was used which I found too distracting. Another nice touch is the various types of damages your starship could sustain; these actually affected your display or flying abilities until you could dock with a starbase and repair them (docking with a damaged engine was particularly challenging). There aren't many sounds in the game, but the ones that are there are decent.

The Bad
The gameplay was complex to learn; without the instruction manual, you would pretty much be completely lost. Even after learning the game, some operations always seemed to be overly difficult, such as docking with starbases. After playing many times, I still screwed that up on a regular basis. Visually the game wasn't terribly exciting. Graphics are blocky, the sprites are all single color without much detail, and the game speed slows down when too many explosions are on screen. You can't expect too much from a 3D game in 1982 though, and it doesn't distract from the gameplay much so it's not too big a deal (even if it's not pretty, everything you need to see is on screen and clear enough).

The Bottom Line
If you can get past the challenge in learning the game, it's a lot of fun to play even if it isn't the best looking game on the 5200. The increasingly challenging missions you'll need to complete in order to obtain higher rankings provide plenty of replay value, I spent many hours with this one!

The Good

It's a race against the clock: The bad guys jump across grid sectors of the system, heading your bases. Your job is to intercept them all. If you spend too long finding the wrong route, or have trouble shooting enemy ships when you intercept them, then at best your final rank will decrease, and at worst, you'll be too late to prevent the other enemy fleets from attacking your base ships elsewhere.

The very best thing about this game is the "I can just do this one more bit" tug that makes you commit too far, with the price being complete failure. Of course that might just be because I wasn't very good at it :o)

To help your game, you have the 'galaxy map', which is a grid showing friendly and enemy occupation, where you can select your next hyperspace destination. You also have a 'long range scanner' view of the immediate area, where all objects rotate in 3D as your ship moves and turns.

Skill and accuracy do play a large part in the game: when jumping between sectors, you must keep a wobbly cursor centred in the crosshairs - this wobbling increases with the distance of your jump, so you have to be good to pull those off to be on target and land in the thick of the action as quickly as possible. Also, fast accurate shooting is rewarded with a good rank at the end.

Graphically, despite being mostly three shades of green at most, this game stood out, especially with its smooth and detailed starfields, full-screen rotating 3D scanner view, and frame-fast enemy sprites. It really is a very technically accomplished piece of programming, and a well balanced game, despite the limitations of the time.

A few aspects of the game are just pure luck: If you happen to find the tougher class of enemy ship, your game is made much more difficult, and unless you're really good, your ranking will suffer as a result.

While in an occupied sector, the computer hardware limitations mean that you could only take on one or two enemy ships at once. This leads to a predictable 'queuing' of enemies if you take a while to dispatch the first.

The cryptic ranking system at the end of the game means you don't really know how well you did. Thankfully, it's obvious if you're rated as "Garbage Scow Captain" - pretty obviously a justified insult in response to playing a poor game!

The Good
For a game released in the late 70s, this is an absolutely mindblowing piece of work, particularly for something that fits into an 8K ROM cartridge! It has also stood the test of time very well.

The graphics were impressive for the time, and given the technical limitations of the hardware on which it runs, are still impressive today. The framerate is incredible, only when there are explosions on screen do you get a chance to take a breath, the rest of the time everything is moving so fast you really have to keep your wits about you.

The sound also suits this title well, and while there isn't that much to hear, what there is suits the mood perfectly. There is no music, but that wouldn't suit the serious tone of this title. What there is is what is needed - the sound of your photon torpedos firing, the sound of your ion drive pushing you through space, the sound of your hyperdrive warping you to a new sector for yet more frantic action, the sound of alarms going off as you enter a sector containing enemy craft, and of course, the satisfying sound of an enemy craft exploding!

I love how everything happens in real time - you snooze, you will lose, from the moment you start the game the Zylon craft are on the attack, trying to sorround and then destroy your precious star bases, which it is your task to defend.

The tactical element is fantastic too - do you risk disabling your shields when you think you won't need them to conserve energy? How will you attack the enemy Zylon craft?

The Bad
There is very little I don't like about this game. About the only room for improvement as far as I am concerned was the difficulty curve - choose NOVICE and it's far too easy, yet PILOT, WARRIOR & COMMANDER are much tougher and even those who can easily complete a NOVICE mission will probably struggle to get better then a ROOKIE rating in any skill level higher then novice - if they finish at all!

The Bottom Line
The original and best 3D space shooter, defend your star bases, destroy the invading zylon attack fleet, and do it quickly, because the clock is ticking!