asteroids posts

There are only a few games with less of a story than Asteroids. The classic sci-fi shooter from Atari is bascially you shooting stuff that are supposed to be rocks in space with an icon that's supposed to be a laser-armed space ship. Pac-Man has more of a plot. Yet, the Hollywood Reporter states that several studios were actually in a recent bidding war to get the movie rights to the game.

The story repors that Universal "won" the bidding war and that screenwriter Matthew Lopez is handling the "adaptation" (he basically has a clean slate to write whatever he wants, we imagine). Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who also produced the awful Doom movie adaptation, is one of the producers of this flick. We hope Universal will get its money back from this deal.

SketchFighter 4000 Alpha, from Ambrosia Software, is a fiendishly difficult game. It's a top-down shooter in the style of the old vector graphics-based games like Asteroids, Gravitar, and Omega Race. However, the standout element (at least at first) is its graphic style: the game is rendered as though drawn in a grade-school student's tablet of graph paper. This extends not merely to the background (gray grid against plain white), but to the player's ship, the game's enemies, the obstacles, everything. This isn't just a refreshing change of pace -- the retro feel is inherent it the game's actual gameplay as well. How? Read on!

On today's MacMonday, we're going seriously old school, to the tune of 1993, when Ambrosia Software sold their first game, Maelstrom. Just as it's easy to dismiss last MacMonday's Big Kahuna Reef 2: Chain Reaction as a Bejeweled clone, Maelstrom takes as its source the classic coin-op Asteroids.

Yet the differences between the two titles are vast indeed, going beyond the color palette and updated graphics. We'll go into detail and examine why Maelstrom is just as addictive and playable today as it was 15 years ago.

Long before there were home consoles or Flash-based and downloadable games accessible via the Internet, the only place to get your gaming fix was the venerable video arcade. For those of our readers who may be too young to remember the arcade boom of the 1980s, these were spacious, sometimes dimly-lit buildings filled with games housed in large cabinets; some later games were contained in sit-down, glass-topped tables. These spaces were home to the grand, seminal casual games that have become enshrined within gamers' memories as the first great games of our time. Titles like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Joust, Dig Dug, etc., and the gameplay they embodied, have been the basis for all games that have followed since.

However, as home console systems became available, and their game libraries grew both in size and complexity, the once-ubiquitous video arcades dwindled in number from thousands country-wide to perhaps tens per state, and even that figure might be optimistic. With the focus of electronic entertainment switching to the home, gamers also left the arcades en masse, in favor of playing at home alone, or at best, with one or two friends who didn't have a system of their own. These players might not have known it then, but soon they would subconsciously realize that they were missing something integral to the gaming experience that wouldn't return for years.