Well the wait is finally over – Asteroids, the massive arcade hit that even challenged Space Invaders for the top dog position two years ago (1979) has arrived to the Atari VCS 2600. Seriously it’s an awesome feeling as I don’t have to place 20c every time just to play this game. Considering every advertising blurb mentions to ‘bring the arcade game at home’, my immediate though back then is ‘just try it’. Well I guessed correctly as the gameplay is still there however visually, not so great. Then again, there’s only so much you can do on the Atari 2600 using run-of-the-mill TV sets.
If you have been living under a rock, Asteroids is all about blasting those ‘floating’ rocks of destruction before it blast you into bits by simply colliding into you. Straight off the bat, there’s only four of those bad boys floating about however that soon change as the moment you shoot at it, it divides into two smaller rocks. Hit them again it further divides into two even smaller rocks. Hit that they eventually get destroyed. So basically each large asteroid needs to be shot seven times to be totally eliminated.
But it’s not that easy as, even though the asteroids have a set direction, hitting those changes to another direction – thankfully within a straight line regardless. In addition, the higher the levels, the more asteroids appear. I think the maximum is about sixteen big asteroids so you can potentially have around 112 floating about but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. I tried this many times however failed miserably as you bound to destroy some of the smaller asteroids, no matter what.
But the fun doesn’t stop there as, depending upon the difficulty level, you can have either a satellite or UFO making a guest appearance. The Satellite is the larger of the two and those shoot at a random direction. The UFO is a little more cunning and has a decent aim however both has the tendency colliding into an asteroid. If so, obviously they get destroyed and in the process, depending upon the size, either the asteroid divides itself or simply disintegrate – another words, it has the same effect as when you fire an asteroid.
Unlike the arcade version where to control your ship requires pressing five buttons, here it’s designed to use the joystick with just one fire button (thankfully). So left / right turns the ship, up is thrust and down triggers the ‘special’ move. Again, depending upon the difficulty level selected, the ‘special’ manoeuvre can be ‘shields up’ (that only last 2 seconds / wave otherwise you blow up), ‘hyperspace’ (teleport in another random spot on the screen) or ‘flip’ (flip your spaceship a full 180 degrees). There’s also an option where you have no special manoeuvres as well.
So as the box art tells us, there’s a whopping 66 video games for Asteroids. Well, technically yes however it takes into an account literally every possible variable – that is one player game under ‘a’ mode (hard) with no special features is one game and the two player variant with the exact same features is game two and so on. Yet Atari considered kids will be playing this game as well so it introduced the ‘b’ mode variant (easy mode). Seriously, playing in ‘b’ mode is too boring, well for me anyways.
So with all these options, what to do, what to do you may ask? Personally I prefer the flip feature under ‘a’ as the other features (hyperspace / shields) cause for havoc. Then again, I reckon that the ‘hardest’ feature is hyperspace as it randomly teleports you to another part of the screen – other words, most likely straight in the line of another asteroid. Flip is awesome as, during the higher waves, turning left / right is too slow hence ‘flipping’ will save you time. Also I rarely move my ship hence mainly stay in the middle of the screen. Moving can be a little complicated as your ship doesn’t simply stop dead – I guess it’s like travelling in space where you cannot ‘break’ to stop.
Also, when firing, keep in mind that you can only have max of four shots on the screen at any given time so crazily firing at a small asteroid and miss could be your worst nightmare. I tend to fire just two shots at a distant asteroid hence save another two just in case one creeps up on me. Yet there’s a ‘cheat’ where you can leave just one asteroid floating about and just shoot UFOs / Satellites when they appear. You can pretty much do this as long as you like (as long you don’t blow up in the process of course). Asteroids ‘experts’ have done this trick and naturally cheeses off the owners as they want people to put more coins in the machine instead of having the ‘champ’ playing for untold hours.
Visually this game is an eyesore and there’s actually a good reason for that too. The arcade version uses a high resolution vector graphics that Atari dubbed ‘QuadraScan’ – their reason for this is it allows precise aiming and smooth animation. However, when porting to the Atari VCS, no TV sets have this technology therefore opt for raster graphics – i.e. block graphics. So, as come to expect, the Atari VCS is an eyesore – blocky graphics. Heck, on the bright side, the home VCS version is filled with colour so you get to see pink asteroids (among others).
Also another limitation for the home version is memory. The arcade version uses 16KB to run this baby however, Atari wanted to distribute this game in cartridge format, maximum memory is only 4KB ROM (as most programmers thought 1KB – 2KB is sufficient). Well, Asteroids needed more than 4KB so Atari’s R&D team developed ‘bank-switching’ – meaning it ‘fooled’ the Atari VCS thinking it has two 4KB cartridges and ‘switches’ between them giving it a grand total of 8KB. This is what I call dedication.
So while the Atari VCS version of Asteroids is not what we have envisioned (as we are bring the arcades home), I have to admire what Atari has done to make the best of what they have got – that is having cartridge games filled with 8KB ROM (bank switching) and have to opt using raster graphics, the gameplay feel is still there. Not as smooth as the arcades however it’s still acceptable. Yet I was hoping that you can start immediately with 16 big asteroids mode instead of plowing my way from the bottom up. Heck, Missile Command have that option so I wasn’t sure why Asteroids didn’t.
Final note: if Atari was so concerned about the 4KB ROM limit, why not introduce this game to the Atari 800 computers in disk format. Single density disk can take around 90KB of data…but I guess they want to sell more Atari 2600 VCS. All in all, it’s definitely a worthwhile addition to your gaming collection besides its technical limitations.