Game of the MONTH - Mad Planets

Yep, it's my first GOTM.  Mad Planets is my favorite new Old School game I've discovered in the last several months.

It' a little like Asteroids with a different control scheme and colored graphics.  And with waaaayyy crazier gameplay.

You control your ship with a joystick (8-way) and spin the direction you are facing to fire from your ship with a spinner/dial.  Obviously if you don't have the right controls in your MAME setup, it can be a difficult game to control.  You need a button on your joystick, a push/pull spinner or a completely diff setup like an Xbox controller to be able to do everything you need easily.  If you don't have buttons on your JS or spinner, than it would help to have three hands or maybe you could press the fire button with something else like your elbow or your dick.

Control stuff aside, the game is absolutely frenetic.  The round starts with planets materializing (usually from the middle) and you have to shoot them before they grow to full size.  If they get to full size, they sprout moons that orbit them.  When they have moons, you have to shoot and destroy all the moons orbiting a planet before you can kill the planet.  The problem is that the planets/moons chase you and the more moons you kill, the "Madder" the planets get and they become much more aggressive in chasing you down (they kill you by running into you).  When you've destroyed the last moon of a planet, it chases you relentlessly and you better kill it in your first couple of shots or you'll be dead.  The action is crazy.  Between everything chasing you and the cool move-around/spin-around-to-fire controls, you are all over the screen and totally tense the entire game.

Other stuff:

If you kill all the planets before they mature and sprout moons you get a perfect round bonus.

Some planets and moons go rogue on their own.

In later rounds comets appear and chase you all over the place.

Also in later rounds, astronauts appear for you to pick-up and score bonus points.

I can't possibly describe the fun if you haven't played it.

Here's a video someone (not me) posted on youtube of the dedicated game...