[Rogue Retro Gaming] Asteroids (Arcade)

When searching for some of the Atari 2600 best games, I found a game I have forgotten of, but one that just hearing the name brought me fond memories. Today we are going to look at the arcade game Asteroids, the game was released in 1979 by Atari in America and Taito in Japa, and was one of the staples in arcade rooms all over the world.

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Plot
You are in control of a spaceship in an asteroid field, your mission is to destroy the asteroids before they hit you. There are also extraterrestrial saucers that attack you if you don't destroy them first. Survival is your objective.

Graphics and gameplay
Asteroids game has vectorial graphics, which was a popular graphic design in space games since you can get your black space background with white lines doing the shapes of all the asteroids and spaceships. All things in the game are well defined and you have the idea of what they are supposed to be. Since a lot of other games at those times graphics were so bad you didn't even know what was suppose to be the objects on your screen.

Gameplaywise, the game consists of you moving your spaceship to avoid getting hit using the joystick on the arcade machine, trying to break away from colliding with huge asteroids that are fast in coming towards you, the higher the level the harder it got by moving the asteroids harder and spawning more asteroids at one time. You can also use the button on the arcade machine to shoot a laser towards the asteroids and extraterrestrial saucers that invade your screen. You have to be careful since asteroids break into little pieces when you shoot at them and those pieces have to get destroyed too since you can also crash into them. You get three lives until game over but every 10,000 points give you an extra life.

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This is another classic and fun game you I recommend you to play, buying an Asteroids arcade cabinet can run you up to 1,500 USD on eBay since they are a collector's item, but thankfully the game has been ported to several different consoles including the Atari 2600 and new small "arcades" that you can buy for as low as 12 USD on eBay.

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Have you played games Asteroids or another classic arcade game?

Share your memories with us!

These quick looks are my own findings and original thoughts acquire while playing the game