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Spacewar! Legacy
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Cerberus - Arcade (1985) |
With increasing color depth and resolutions, lower manufacturing costs and greater durability, raster-based machines would eventually leave vector games behind in the mid-80s. Even the vector fanatics at Cinematronics eventually bowed to the trends. Despite a vastly different look, Cerberus* was a spiritual successor to Rip Off. Once again one has to protect small rectangles from getting stolen by alien attackers. Both in presentation and mechanics, Cerberus* goes one step ahead of Rip Off, though. Each stage begins with a cutscene of the player's mothership getting electrocuted, which results in a loss of all of its shiny energy(?) crystals. Now it's up to the player to pick them up one by one and reattach them to the mothership. Enemies come in different types, with a strict distinction between attackers and gem gatherers. Interestingly, it doesn't matter at all how often the player is shot down—the game goes on as long as there are crystals in play. After ten stages a bonus crystal is awarded. The background continuously scrolls diagonally, but that's only a cosmetic element. Although Cerberus* was a neat little game, the genre definitely had passed its prime in the arcades, and ultimately it couldn't save Cinematronics from their financial troubles. The company was acquired by Tradewest in 1987 and renamed to Leland Corp.
Cerberus* |
Cerberus*
Cerberus* |
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Blasteroids - Arcade, C64, MSX, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga, IBM PC (1987) |
Long after vector graphics had left the arcades and fully 360 degrees space games were mostly dead, Atari tried to revitalize the genre and their revenues by remaking their former bestseller. Blasteroids retains the single-screen stages of the original, but now one gets to choose between four dimensions (difficulty levels), each of which holds a navigatable star map to access the individual stages. Since no one would have cared for the extremely simple gameplay of Asteroids in 1987, you're not just firing at simple asteroids anymore. Alien attackers now play a much greater role in the later stages, and there are several new types of rock formations in free space— red boulders recharge the ship's energy shield, while blue ones grow bigger and bigger when shot at. Then at the end of each dimension, one has to fight Mukor, the ugly alien from the cover.
Blasteroids (Arcade) The biggest change from the original, however, are the three forms the player ship can transform into. The first form has the most destructive gun of the three and is the "balanced" one. It can transform into a large ship with extra strong shields but very slow maneuvering, while the thin form is the exact opposite. Finally, enemies drop several powerups like gun upgrades, shields, etc. As a post-crash Atari title, Blasteroids didn't get any console ports, but was available for all the major computer platforms. Since they all have to deal with one-button joysticks, the controls here are less than intuitive, but no major elements are missing. The presentation of course underwent various degrees of downsizing, with the Atari ST, Amiga and DOS (unless the badly converted CGA graphics are used) versions closest to the arcade. |
Blasteroids (Arcade)
Blasteroids (Arcade)
Blasteroids (Arcade) |
Comparison Screenshots
Arcade |
Amiga |
C64 |
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IBM PC (VGA) |
IBM PC (EGA) |
IBM PC (CGA) |
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Amstrad CPC |
ZX Spectrum |
MSX |
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Afteroids - ZX Spectrum, MSX, CPC (1988) |
Afteroids is the first game in this article that was made in Spain, and it wastes no opportunity to tell you so: On the cover, on the bootup screen, in the ingame graphic tiles, in the advertisement... it's everywhere! The game follows in the footsteps of Star Maze, as once again you're not maneuvering through open space, but rather a number of halls and corridors. Afteroids does improve on the controls of its spiritual predecessor, but there's still no friction (funny how so far all the games in open space had it, but the ones with interior stages often don't), which once again results in much uncontrolled wall bouncing; at least now hitting a wall slows the ship down. Compared to Sir-Tech's game, though, there's no higher motive for the player to enter the mazes, the only target is to eliminate as many asteroids and other enemies as possible. The asteroids are typically more dangerous because they shattering apart, but occasionally they drop powerups like a spreadshots, extra bombs, ammunition or time.
Afteroids (Spectrum) Zigurat made versions for three different 8-bit home computers, with the Spectrum and CPC versions having the usual peculiarities in their working with color. The Spectrum spends all its colors on the interface, while the Amstrad version thankfully uses its limited palette to distinguish the sprites from the background. The MSX game is just one of those lazy pixel perfect Spectrum conversions. |
Afteroids (Amstrad CPC)
Afteroids (Amstrad CPC)
Afteroids (Spectrum) |
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Ebonstar - Amiga (1988) |
Like Omega Race, Ebonstar pretends to be a sports competition in a dystopian future. Up to four players can take part with joysticks, mouses and keyboards, and the goal is to push enemies into a black hole created by a strange moving machine. The backdrop is a blue grid, to highlight the effect of the black hole bending space around it. The players' shots don't actually destroy anything, they just let the target bounce back. Every hit gives a few points, but only pushing objects into the black hole brings the big high scores. The black hole machine throws CPU-controlled combatants into the field every once in a while, and bigger ships come directly out of the black hole. Those are guarded by a shield until they get far enough away from the hole, and their bullets actually do kill. While the standard control scheme is just like in Spacewar! or Asteroids, joystick players can also switch to controls with absolute directions. The ship takes just as long to turn around as with relative controls, so this setting feels rather unresponsive. With whatever settings, Ebonstar is through and through a multiplayer experience. The game can also be played alone, but the option might as well not even be there: The pace is very slow, and the enemies are much too overpowered. Without the ability to catch the large ships in cross fire, they can only be taken out through a ridiculous amount of luck or by crashing into them, which of course kills the player as well. |
Ebonstar
Ebonstar |
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Stardust Amiga, Atari STE, IBM PC (1992) |
The Amiga was home to a whole slew of Asteroids clones, but the Stardust games from Bloodhouse in Finland are by far the most significant of them, not necessarily by virtue of any particular innovations, but rather their popularity and, at least in case of the second game, the outstanding quality. The element that distinguishes Stardust from Blasteroids the most are the different extra weapons that replace Atari's transforming ship. New weapons can be plundered from enemy transports during the game, but at first most of them are useless: The bouncer hardly does any damage at all, the flamethrower has about a ship length of range, and so on. Fortunately, it's possible to route upgrades to a different weapon than the one currently used, so upgrading them is relatively save. Just like Blasteroids, the game starts with a map for stage selection. Here it's five star systems with six stages each (nine in the last "world") that have to be cleared before a boss appears after the last wave of enemies. The game starts out with the typical drifting asteroids in various colors, but eventually more interesting foes show up, like flying razorblades and a gigantic spaceworm with an indestructible steel head, whose middle parts can only be shot through clever maneuvering.
Stardust (IBM-PC) In general the program seems to lack polish, though. For whatever reason it is not possible to accelerate and turn at the same time, which makes the controls feel very stiff and unsatisfying. Inertia is also much to high, while friction is barely existent. All menus, including the one for switching the weapons, are painfully slow. Attack waves within a stage are also often broken up by awkward pauses where nothing is happening, and at the end one is often forced to pick up dozens of item drops (health or shield regeneration, auto-activated smart bombs, etc.) before the score table shows up. Each world is connected to the next one with a tunnel shooter sequence; a welcome and cool-looking (by 1992 standards) change at first, but soon it starts to frustrate with its indestructible instant-kill mines, especially since the tunnels are also ridiculously long. Early stages start out fairly easy if not boring, but about midway through difficulty rises with a pretty harsh curve. To make your life a little easier, you can adjust the difficulty and the number of extra lives, but the later stages remain hard to conquer regardless. The PC version gives the advantage of saving after every stage, whereas the original was content with passwords for each world. |
Stardust (IBM-PC)
Stardust (IBM-PC)
Stardust (IBM-PC) |
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Super Stardust Amiga, CD32, IBM-PC (1994) |
Two years after their surprise hit, the guys at Bloodhouse followed up with the upgraded Super Stardust. While at its core the same game all over again, Super Stardust corrects most of the flaws of the original for a much more enjoyable experience. Most importantly, the controls and physics are fixed, so the ship steers as smoothly as one could wish for. Difficulty now comes from the enemies alone, which from the beginning are much more dangerous than they used to be, although it's mostly recycled species. There are a few new ones with cool effects, like the cloaked bombers. Changing weapons frequently to properly deal with enemies is also much less of a chore, since the weapon menu now appears instantly. Even the tunnel missions are fixed; though still awfully long, the mines don't kill you at every single mistake, and there are mini bosses in between to mix up the pace. Bloodhouse really pushed the presentation to new heights for the genre. The odd mixture of pixel art backgrounds and cheaply raytraced sprites of the predecessor is gone, making way for some of the best prerendered presentations on the Amiga. There's a FMV intro that shows a crazy penguin destroying the world, as well as some shorter clips after bosses. The first game had quite a lot of options, but now their number is almost overwhelming. Besides the usual (but unusually thorough) sound and graphics settings, the most interesting one is a switch for the amount of friction to the ship. The PC version, which came a little late and was thus dubbed Super Stardust 96, loses its save game function though, so DOS users have to write down passwords like everyone else. Interestingly, Housemarque (the successor to Bloodhouse) brought back the franchise for a PSN "remake" in 2009. Other than the title suggests, however, Super Stardust HD is not a graphically enhanced rendition of Super Stardust, but just one of the many dozens of samey twin stick shooters that litter modern console download services, and has little to do with its legacy.
Super Stardust 96 (IBM PC) |
Super Stardust 96 (IBM PC)
Super Stardust 96 (IBM PC) |
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Asteroids / Asteroids Hyper 64 - PSX, Windows, Macintosh, Game Boy Color, Nintendo 64 (1998) |
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American PSX Cover |
Japanese PSX Cover |
N64 Cover |
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Apparently someone at Activision had a search through Atari's back catalogue for dusty money making machines in 1997, as that year the reborn company acquired the rights to remake a few properties from its fellow downtrodden industry veteran, namely Battle Zone and Asteroids. In the case of the latter, aside from a new coat of polygonal paint and a backstory as superficial as it is forgettable, not much was done to bring the old franchise up to speed. All stages still take place on a single screen, although Activision opted for themed zones, similar to Stardust. More often than not, the new Asteroids feels like a rehash of various additions that Asteroids-clones had brought over the years. While the first zone is just the old Asteroids experience, the following stages add some "new" element: Zone 2 contains a black hole in the middle (like Spacewar!) and indestructible rocks, which can be moved by shooting at them; Zone 3 takes place above a red sun, which shoots out deadly heat discharges; zone 4 drops the player in the lair of giant space worms. Only the final zone really differs in the way it is approached, though, as here player(s) get to defend a planet against attacks from outer space, which is reminiscent of Atari's Missile Command. Though each zone extends over 15 stages, only at the very end awaits a single boss fight. Naming other features like the three spaceships with different attributes (plus one unlockable bonus ship) and special weapons would read like a to-do list for any ambitious homebrew Asteroids clone, there's nothing really special here. The one fun idea are the wireframe asteroids, which are worth exactly 1979 points. (The original game can be unlocked as well.)
Originally Syrox Developments developed the game for PC and PlayStation, but a handheld version for the GBC soon followed. It lacks the boss of the big versions, and the flickering is from hell, but otherwise it's a faithful port, given the circumstances. It is also one of those early GBC games that had to invent some superficial use of the Game Boy Camera, so upon clearing the game one can print out a certificate with the attained score. Macsoft delivered a port for Apple Macintosh computers. The N64 version, published by Crave, was expanded and labeled Asteroids Hyper 64. It adds five new player ships, new bosses and a rather boring sixth zone with Saturn in the background. It is the best version of the game thanks to its expanded content, but that doesn't mean much in this case, as the whole concept was just uninspired and untimely in 1999.
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Asteroids Hyper 64 (N64)
Asteroids Hyper 64 (N64) |
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Asteroids (PSX) |
Asteroids (PSX) |
Asteroids (PSX) |
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