Blasteroids


Before anything, here's some thoughts on the game by its original coin-op author, Ed Rotberg (taken from here)


Quote:

"Blasteroids" came long after the previous "Asteroids" games. What's the story behind the revival of the concept? I always wanted to do a rock/paper/scissors kind of game, and Dan Van Eldren, the Vice President of Engineering at Atari when I rejoined, wanted to revisit the "Asteroids" concept with a new twist. We thought that we could combine the two notions to gives us what we wanted. The original idea was that we would contrive some scenarios that would require a specific ship form to get through. However, as often happens, there was a hole in the manufacturing schedule, and our product got pushed forward. We had to rush it out, and it never got the tuning we had originally planned for it. I also wanted to do something fresh with the graphics for this game. We commissioned Bill George, a model maker at Industrial Light and Magic, to design and build plastic models of the five player ship shapes in "Blasteroids." With the help of Rob Rowe, we then digitized them in the necessary rotations with the proper lighting. The asteroids themselves were digitized in the same fashion from some lava rocks that we got and painted white. Most of the other ships were created with 3-D modelers, but some were hand drawn. Were you a fan of the original "Asteroids"? Absolutely. I was one of the many people that Ed Logg had to drive out of his lab area so that he could work on the game. We were always sneaking in to play it whenever he stepped away for a while. There was a pretty fierce competition to get on the high score table, especially as this was the first Atari product that had a high score table. How did "Blasteroids" do in arcades? So-so. It was an eleven month project. I would like to believe that if we had more time we could have improved it significantly, but there are never any guarantees of that.

There are three ships you can change to at will, each with its own settings of fire speed, movement speed and shield. On a 2 player game if one player changes to the smallest ship and the other to the largest, they can combine for an uber ship with lots of shield and fire power (the catch of course being that one player controls the movement and the other the firing. Given though that both can rotate independently of the other makes for a real orchestrated mayhem!). Also, instead of plain rocks that explode into smaller pieces, there are red rocks that can give a power crystal which replenishes the ship's energy, blue ones that as you shoot them they get larger until they halt completely, and seeker ones that, well, seek you. Powerups include better firepower, bigger energy capacity, more speed, shields, dual fire, a kind of smartbomb (ship spins really fast firing in all directions), and cloak. There are also end-of level boss fights that are easy if you know how. After each screen is finished a map shows up which shows you the possible screens you can visit and what objects to expect.

The ST port holds up to the arcade pretty good, and even if Ed is not entirely satisfied with it, it has given me lots of hours of fun!

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