Collection essentials #347: Asteroids (PS1)

My favorite video game that was released in the 1970s is the arcade game Asteroids by Atari. I haven’t mentioned Asteroids yet in this series, because there hadn’t been a good home port of it. In my opinion, the Atari 2600 rendition of the game was just not very good.

Asteroids is a game that used “vector graphics” in the arcade (those types of games look like everything was drawn with a white pen on a black background). You control a small triangle which represents your ship, and upon starting the game there are a few asteroids floating around you. An immediate thing you’ll notice is that movement doesn’t work in the same way that it normally does in other video games. The developers tried to make movement work like it actually would in outer space. You have a “thrust” button that you have to hold down in order to move forward, and you won’t immediately stop upon letting go of it. Mastering the art of space movement is an important part of succeeding at and enjoying the game. Another quirk of this game is how asteroids work. The goal is to destroy them all, but when you shoot an asteroid, it doesn’t immediately disappear. They start out rather big, and when you shoot one, it splits into two smaller asteroids, and then those pieces will also split into smallest pieces which actually can be destroyed. Smaller asteroids are faster, trickier to hit, and if you let too many of them exist at one time then it can suddenly be extremely difficult to dodge them all. So the player has to be smart as to how they go about their mission. And on top of that, sometimes hostile UFOs will appear and start blasting shots that can destroy your ship and sometimes hit asteroids too. It’s a fairly simple but very well-made and addictive arcade classic.

In the late ‘90s, 3D remakes of old Atari games were kind of a trend for a bit. These remakes were kinda low budget, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t any fun though. The 3D graphics are…not the best look, honestly, the game looks rather dreary and the asteroids are a little harder to keep track of. But there’s fun gameplay stuff mixed in to make this a version worth trying out. You can pilot different ships with different attributes, which is always a welcome choice in a game like this. There’s a power-up system here as well to give you things like alternate weapons and shields. There are some new things and enemies to shoot now other than just the plain asteroids. And the cherry on top is that you can unlock a direct port of the original arcade game.

This little remake could have been better and the developers could have been more ambitious, but as a fan of the arcade game I wasn’t disappointed. This was a cool reimagining of a classic, and you’ll have fun with it as long as you go in with the right expectations.