Minimum Requirements: 200 MHz Macintosh, 32MB RAM, 60MB free hard disk space, Mac OS 8.1, CD-ROM drive (hadware accelerated mode requires 64MB RAM and a Rage Pro or higher 3D card with full support for Open GL)
Network Feature: No
3Dfx Support: Yes
Retail Price: $29.99
Availability: Out Now
I don't even know where to begin this review. It just seems so odd to me, reviewing Asteroids.
Asteroids, one of the first video games I ever played while spending the day at Geneva-on-the-Lake as a youngster.
Asteroids, the way I'd pass my childhood summer afternoons with Scott Anderson and his Atari 2600.
Asteroids, with its simple vector graphics and even simpler "bom...bom...bom" soundtrack that mesmerized me.
When Asteroids came out, I was still pulling my tube socks up to my knees. We're on the verge of the next millennium here. Surely I can't be reviewing Asteroids! Surely this must be a retro review!
Nope. It's not a retro review. It's Asteroids, and it's the latest arcade title from our good friends at MacSoft.
The box for Asteroids claims the original is "...the biggest arcade hit in history." I can't imagine that's true...I would've thought that to be Pooyan or Journey, but I'll take their word for it. Asteroids was certainly one of the first, and no doubt many people behind today's computer games teethed on Atari's vector graphics gem.
But oh, how far we've come. As cool as vector graphics are, there just isn't a lot of room for them in today's gaming world. What there is room for, however, is classic arcade action and modern 3D accelerated graphics. Asteroids tries to bridge the two, and it succeeds. The question is, should that bridge be built at all?
For those who don't know, the basic premise of Asteroids is to fly around the game screen and shoot asteroids. Simple enough. The screen wraps so that you never actually leave the game area. If you pass the top of the screen, you reappear at the bottom. Fly off the right edge, you come back in on the left. The Asteroids do the same, so the only way to get rid of them is to blow them up. Shoot one, it splits into two or three, shoot one of those, it splits again. Get them small enough, and they finally vaporize. Once they're all gone, more appear...until you die.
Now that I think about it, Asteroids may have been my first lesson in the futility of human endeavors. Now matter how good I was or how many quarters I put in that machine, I would never be able to rid outer space of all those asteroids. Sad.
But anyway, that was then, this is now. To update Asteroids for the modern gamer, Activision added power-ups, multiple ship styles, varying types of asteroids and space debris, a two-player mode...everything you'd expect to find in today's computer games. Of course, you also get wild new backdrops that can even take advantage of hardware 3D acceleration. Instead of piloting your ship over the empty blackness of space, you're zipping around the sun, across a black hole, above the Earth, and more (the gyrating effect of the black hole zone may be the coolest thing I've seen in a computer game yet this year, and indeed, since the helium tree scene in Titan A.E.).
The asteroids themselves have also received a face lift. Rather than simply update the space rocks, the game introduces mined asteroids, fireball comets, cystal asteroids, alien egg asteroids and a bevy of other junk that must be destroyed. To help, they've supplied you with a slew of power-ups; homing missiles, plasma drills, smartbombs...you know the routine. As with any game of this sort, that wimpy little laser you get at the beginning won't keep you alive for long. However, neither will most of these wildcard weapons, I'm afraid. When you've got over half-a-dozen Asteroids zipping past in all directions, there's not a lot of time to sit and think about special weapons.
Of course, you can't really offer more asteroids without offering more alien spaceships, right? In the old days, there were two; a big one and a little one. In the updated version, there are over ten types of bad guys who'd rather you just left all those asteroids alone. Most simply fire at you, but others will try to ram you, push you into asteroids, freeze you, and so on. Of course, you get your choice of four ships as well. Do you favor a faster ship or one with more firepower? Is durability important, or do you want one that's evenly balanced? Figure out which best fits your style, then get to cleaning.
A nice touch is that when you turn left or right, the retro rockets shoot a flame from the side of your ship. Aside from looking cool, these also help in that they, along with your main thruster, can be used to push asteroids that are coming too close to your ship.
So do all these new features enhance the gameplay of Asteroids? Well, yes, but I'm not sure that's for the best. It's certainly more interesting to look at and the action is more intense, but--as odd as this may sound--that doesn't make the game more fun to play. In the original, it was just you and the asteroids. You felt alone while playing. You felt helpless. But the new Asteroids throws so much at you so quickly that the feeling of solitude is lost in the space junk. They even go so far to work in a story; rather than just being plopped into space to die for no reason, you're hired by the Astro-Mining Company and ordered into space to die to enhance their bottom line.
Suddenly it's not only futile, but also a lot less noble.
I'm going to contradict myself now and point out that whereas the clutter and intensity rob the game of its original appeal, they do help alleviate the boredom. The problem with most early arcade games is that once you became good at them, you also became bored. MacSoft's Asteroids gives you plenty to see and hear to stop that from happening, including a multiplayer mode. You can't play over the internet, but you can share a keyboard and see who can "clean up his room the fastest."
Before I close up this review, I must point out an extremely annoying bug. No matter at what volume my system sound was set, the game would blast so loudly that the National Guard would show up at my door to quell the uprising. Every time I launched the game I had to turn down the music and sound effects to the bare minimum, and even then the mission briefing (yes, there are mission briefings because--after all--you can't just blow up asteroids for no reason) would still play far too loudly.
Asteroids is not the first arcade update from MacSoft (remember America's Greatest Arcade Hits 3D?), and it won't be the last; Centipede and Pong (Pong?!) are on their way. Now I'm all for updating classic games, but it's a risky business. As with updates of songs, you'll have one camp that hates it just because it's not the original, and another that will like it for exactly the same reason. I fall in the middle. I think Cheap Trick's version of "Don't Be Cruel" blows Elvis' out of those blue shoes of his, but Madonna's cover of "American Pie" actually sent me to the hospital for two weeks.
And Asteroids? Well, at $29.99, it's priced right to be either a nostalgia trip for serious gamers or a good introduction for casual gamers to the power of Mac gaming. It won't replace Atari's version as "...the biggest arcade hit in history," but it may replace a couple other titles as your "time killer" game of choice...until someone releases Pooyan Millennium, that is.
Asteroids
When Asteroids came out, I was still pulling my tube socks up to my knees. We're on the verge of the next millennium here. Surely I can't be reviewing Asteroids! Surely this must be a retro review!
But anyway, that was then, this is now. To update Asteroids for the modern gamer, Activision added power-ups, multiple ship styles, varying types of asteroids and space debris, a two-player mode...everything you'd expect to find in today's computer games. Of course, you also get wild new backdrops that can even take advantage of hardware 3D acceleration. Instead of piloting your ship over the empty blackness of space, you're zipping around the sun, across a black hole, above the Earth, and more (the gyrating effect of the black hole zone may be the coolest thing I've seen in a computer game yet this year, and indeed, since the helium tree scene in Titan A.E.).
Of course, you can't really offer more asteroids without offering more alien spaceships, right? In the old days, there were two; a big one and a little one. In the updated version, there are over ten types of bad guys who'd rather you just left all those asteroids alone. Most simply fire at you, but others will try to ram you, push you into asteroids, freeze you, and so on. Of course, you get your choice of four ships as well. Do you favor a faster ship or one with more firepower? Is durability important, or do you want one that's evenly balanced? Figure out which best fits your style, then get to cleaning.
I'm going to contradict myself now and point out that whereas the clutter and intensity rob the game of its original appeal, they do help alleviate the boredom. The problem with most early arcade games is that once you became good at them, you also became bored. MacSoft's Asteroids gives you plenty to see and hear to stop that from happening, including a multiplayer mode. You can't play over the internet, but you can share a keyboard and see who can "clean up his room the fastest."