Astro Blaster is an old-school vert shooter. More folks may be familiar with it than the usual GOTD, but it's a little more obscure than some, so I wanted to give it some P.R.
Your ship fires at a wide variety of enemies coming from the sky. Many of which seem to be tweaking from a bad trip with crystal meth. You have two buttons: fire and warp. The fire button does what you think, and the warp button (once per ship) slows everything down for a short period of time (and counts it down so you know when things are going back to normal).
Two other interesting additions... You have a fuel gauge and you need to make sure you finish the round/wave before your fuel runs out. You can get more fuel during a wave by shooting certain specific enemies. You also replenish all your fuel between waves with a docking sequence that frankly, I could do without (it's easy and pointless). The other addition is a weapon temperature gauge. If you fire your weapon too much too fast, it will overheat (you can see the temp rise on the gauge). If it overheats. you will not be able to fire until it cools for a few seconds. This gives the game much more strategy as you can't just fire ad infinitum.
Those extras and some unpredictable enemies make Astro Blaster today's GOTD.
I too thought the docking sequence was pointless until I discovered the hidden bonuses. If you come out of the asteroid scene and fly right into the fuel dock without moving the joystick, you get from 500-1000 bonus points depending on how centered you are. If you are far enough left or right that the side of your ship scrapes against the dock entrance, you get 1500 points (which is risky, because if you crash it's game over regardless of how many lives you have left). Now that I know about these bonuses, I actually think the docking sequence is a cool touch--especially for a game from 1981.
ReplyDeleteCool blog! Cheers
Cynicaster
I love Astro Blaster- glad to see it get some love here!
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