Atari Asteroids

There comes a time in any gamers’ life when they stop and wonder if modern games are the way forward or indeed going back to classic or retro games are more rewarding.

For me, I sit on the fence a little but I do enjoy classic games an awful lot for a number of reasons. One of the simplest yet addictive classic games has to be Asteroids, and fortunately Atari Asteroids is a superb example of retro games brought to the mobile.

As many of you will know, you are the space ship which starts in the middle of the screen. Your objective is to blast away the asteroids until they disappear entirely. The asteroids start out as rather slow moving juggernauts, but as you shoot them, they split up into smaller, faster moving objects which drift around in a random order – posing you in imminent danger.

You don’t have any form of shields, so one hit from the asteroid and you’re toast! Fortunately you have three lives and unlimited ammo so as long as you can move fast enough, you might just stand a chance on getting a decent score.

In the classic style game, you aren’t armed with any real fancy stuff, you do however come equipped with thrusters and a hyper-drive. Boosters help propel you out of the way of flying obstacles – but be warned, you have no brakes so have to use the booster carefully to prevent crashing into another object! When you have no time to boost safely, you should risk hyper-driving. I say risk, as it causes you to disappear briefly and lands you somewhere else on the screen – this can be useful, but can land you in trouble. Both of these are unlimited, but if you engage hyper-drive too often, you’ll blow up!

There are a number of appearances of the game in this, the classic old black and white stick-drawing type game, Modern - which gives you a more attractive version and Techno which is a little more psychedelic looking. Lastly, if you are able to score over 10,000 points in the classic level, you’ll be able to unlock the Virus setting where you play a tiny craft tasked to destroy viruses and nasty infections within the body (they must have watched Inner Space?!) Each of these different levels have different obstacles and hazards to avoid or use to your advantage.

Should you get a little tired of the usual ‘hit and be blown up’ type game, you can play the ‘power-up’ mode, where you can boost weapons and shields but you only have the one craft so look after it!

So in brief, if you enjoy blasting asteroids to space dust and UFO’s to smithereens, then you’ll have found the Mecca for your gaming right here. It’s highly addictive, very entertaining and will keep your thumbs and mind occupied for quite some time. You can pick up and play straight away with the simple controls and indeed, you can put down at any stage (should you be able to draw yourself away from it).

Rating 90%

Positives

This is classic gaming at its best

Very addictive and entertaining

Good yet simple graphics

Negatives

Very repetitive

No mini-games to help spice it up a bit