Posted by Super Turrican on Jul 13, 2010 21:53 (Jul 13, 2010 21:53)
In a nutshell this is what Asteroids would be like if Core Design had done it instead of Atari. The story is practically non-existent, although what you do get is as generic as you’d care to see. You are the only bigger able to get off a space freighter that’s being attacked and you’re more or less left to get rid of the alien menace.
Dodgy plot aside, what we got was an asteroids inspired shooter, but instead of the ship moving around a static screen, the ship would stay central and allow for the scenery behind to pass underneath instead. There were objectives, usually destroying set amount of smaller things before attacking something bigger, but then games of this style were usually only point grabbers, so to have an objective was a refreshing change.
After each couple of levels, your pilot would end up fighting a big boss monster that would have varying degrees of bullet patterns and attack waves. Again, it is a nice twist and is probably what drew me to it more than some other games, bearing in mind how old we’d all have been at the time.
There were others that copied this and in some cases bettered it, such as Stardust, which is also in the top 50, but this was where it began for me. It mixed some arcade fun with some funky graphics and a thumping soundtrack (although if you listen now you would think it was a Westwood guilty pleasure). It still feels like 10p guzzler, but when you consider how far we’ve come now, especially in the Geometry Wars genre, it does feel a little left behind, but it can still hold your attention for half an hour if revisited.
