Asteroids (2600) Review

I spent 26 hrs going for high scores on all 33 single-player game variations on both difficulty settings.

I've never played the arcade version, and only played the Atari 2600 port a couple times at one of my cousins' homes back in the early-'80s. I never knew there was anything other than asteroids to shoot until I read the manual and found out that there are UFOs and satellites, but only if you switch it to the A or Expert (depending on the console model) difficulty. I also didn't know that your ship can have special abilities other than entering hyperspace, depending on the game variation, until reading the manual -- a shield that protects against everything but causes your ship to self-destruct if active for more than two seconds, the ability to instantly "flip" the ship 180°, or not having any special ability, if you didn't know.

The game variations alternate between "slow-moving" and "fast-moving" asteroids, with the odd variations being slow-moving, up until 33, which is for children, and then the 2-player variations begin, using the same pattern as it progresses through the variations. If you don't have the manual, holding down both the Game Select and Game Reset switches makes it cycle through the variations at around double speed. I rolled over the score, which happens at 100,000 points, on all the odd variations that grant extra lives on the beginner difficulty, which doesn't have UFOs and satellites. This meant I suicided the max 9 lives I'd accumulated just to get the game over, as I could have played for as long as I wanted. The amount of asteroids on screen, thus its difficulty, depends on the displayed score, so when you roll it over, it reverts to the beginning difficulty. For the slow-moving asteroid variations, the asteroids continue along their same nearly vertical path when you hit them, only about half of the time changing from moving toward you to moving away from you, or vice versa, which makes it very easy once you get the basic hang of the game. The fast-moving asteroid variations have the asteroids sometimes shoot off at various angles when you get the asteroids down to their smallest of three sizes, which is when the game really becomes fun, since there's actual challenge to it, even before adding the UFOs and satellites. Interestingly, because the children's game variation is variation 1 (slow-moving asteroids, extra life every 5000 points, and hyperspace ability), except that it never gets any more difficult and the asteroids don't split into 2 smaller ones when hit, it's actually more difficult with UFOs and satellites than several of the standard modes due to there only ever being 4 asteroids in play, thus removing a lot of the clutter for the UFOs and satellites to crash into.

This easily moved into my top 10 Atari 2600 games.

Since I recorded them, here are my high scores (variations 7, 8, 15, 16, 23, 24, 31, and 32 don't grant extra lives). I tried to roll over the score. If I couldn't do that, I went for 20,000 points. If, after a half dozen or so tries, if I couldn't get 20,000, I'd settle for at least 10,000.