Arcade Multidirectional Shoot 'Em Up Game Review: Asteroids

Asteroids is a multidirectional shoot 'em up game that was released by Atari to arcades in 1979. It was highly successful, led to many sequels by Atari and its successors, and inspired games from other companies.

It is a game where a spaceship is floating in space and asteroids are flying into it. The goal is to shoot asteroids as well as the asteroid chunks that explode from them. The ship has a thruster which can be used to avoid the asteroids, but the ship will continue in the direction of the thrust unless another is initiated in another direction. Flying saucers will also periodically appear, and like Space Invaders before it, bonus points will be awarded if they are destroyed.

As the ship is in space, the ship can be rotated three-hundred sixty degrees. This rotation can help aim towards the asteroids to line up a shot as well as to choose a direction to move the ship. It is really helpful as the rotation happens quickly, so a well timed activation of the thrusters can keep the ship from blowing up from an asteroid hit.

For as timeless as the gameplay feels, the sound is relegated to simple sounds for the thrust, shots, asteroid explosions, ship explosions, and saucer sounds. There is also a thumping sound, akin to a heartbeat, that increases in intensity as the game goes on. 

The graphics in Asteroids are something that the video game industry hasn't seen in decades outside of retro releases. The displays we are used to are raster that use grids of pixels to display graphics, while Atari's Asteroid used a vector monitor. These monitors used sharp lines for its graphics, which created geometrical shapes without the ability to fill in objects.

There were color vector monitors, but Asteroids was completely in black and white. This actually works well for a game set in the endless dark of space. The triangle-shaped ship with two prongs at the bottom should look familiar to most people. It's the shape of the default marker on navigation devices using the cluster of over thirty satellites that make up the United States Global Positioning System,

The reason for this is interesting. Etak, the company founded in 1983 by Stan Honey, Ken Milnes, and Alan Philips was funded by Catalyst Technologies, a technology incubator that was founded by Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari. Etak pioneered navigational systems and designed the arrow icon specifically after the ship from Asteroids. Modern GPS navigators descend from the Etak Navigator, and the Asteroids ship is the most visible aspect that shows this today.

Asteroids is a classic that is still fun to play today. The vector graphics are antiquated now, but they still do an admirable job portraying the space ships and asteroids. The vector trail left by the shots are also trippy when played on real hardware or in emulators that have simulation of that effect. That's something that isn't seen in today's screens without purposefully coding a simulation of the effect into a game. The uniqueness of the vector effects and the timeless gameplay make this a game that deserves to be played by any shoot 'em up fan for a game or two, if not more.

Final Verdict:

4 out of 5