Asteroids

Well, they finally did it. Atari managed to make a single-player arcade coinop version of Spacewar! that's actually good. The reasons for this success where Computer Space failed are many, and multifaceted; Firstly, the handling strikes a much better balance between arcadey responsiveness and weighty commitment. It doesn't take as long to speed up and slow down as it did on the PDP-1, allowing for a much more reactive play rhythm with sweeping arcs of movement and split-second maneuvers, but at the same time inertia isn't so neutered as to completely trivialize the game by letting you zip around with impunity. At a basic level, absent any context, the movement feels responsive and smooth, but also challenging enough to be really rewarding to come to grips with. It'll take a second to get a strong "feel" for it, and once you do you'll be swooping around setting up aggressive strafing runs and blasting through shrinking gaps between colliding asteroids. Where Spacewar! felt like a fairly robust simulation of piloting a large, unwieldy ship through space, and Computer Space felt like racing around a matchbox car on a near-frictionless surface, Asteroids feels more like a light and agile figure jet, almost akin to roller skating.

So right off the bat, the core mechanics are really keyed in and fine-tuned in a way they simply weren't last time around. On top of that, they're placed in a much more exciting, engaging context. Rather than a pair of languid UFOs in the midst of empty space, the screen in Asteroids is populated with several large, well, asteroids, each of which, when blasted, will split into two smaller ones which shoot off in random directions at random speeds. These medium-sized asteroids will similarly become two even smaller ones when destroyed, which finally will simply disappear with a shot. This behavior creates a multifaceted push and pull of conflicting influences on player behavior: Larger asteroids are easier to hit, but doing so will increase the density of material on the screen as well as the chaos and resultant unpredictability of the play field. Each individual asteroid is perfectly predictable after it's been given its random starting vector; they don't bounce off each other or interact in any way, so until it's shot or hits a ship, any given asteroid will simply follow a straight line at a fixed speed, forever. But, when the screen is full of a couple dozen of them, each moving at a different consistent speed and direction, keeping track of all of them becomes profoundly nontrivial, especially since the edges of the screen wrap around and create blind spots where an asteroid that visually is on the opposite side of the screen can in fact spatially be right next to you.

To this stew of complex and unpredictable asteroid distribution we add, once again, enemy spacecraft. This time around, rather than a constant feature of the play field, UFOs are an occasional added wrinkle to an already lively session. They will, every so often, fly in from one of the sides of the screen and lackadaisically make their way to the opposite side, firing at you and occasionally switching their trajectory to a diagonal up or down, always tending toward the opposite side of the screen from the one they entered through. If they make it to the far side, they're gone.

As you've no doubt surmised from the description of their behavior, UFOs are now something of a bonus, an uncommonly proactive foe that appears for a limited time, aggresses against you, and doles out a nice point reward if you manage to pop it. After a while you start getting smaller ones that attack more aggressively, making them more difficult to contend with both in terms of taking them out and simply surviving their onslaught. A further wrinkle is introduced in the fact that UFOs, unlike the asteroids themselves, can and often do destroy asteroids, either by shooting them, which destroys the asteroid, or colliding with them, which, much like running into an asteroid yourself, destroys both parties in the interaction. You don't get points for asteroids destroyed by UFOs, or for UFOs destroyed by asteroids, so in effect these enemies are capable of robbing you of points.

Taken as a whole, all of this creates a, frankly, stunningly dynamic and freeform play experience. Even constrained to a single screen, the possibility space stretches out past the relatively closed-in edges of the play field and manages to provide fresh thrills with every game. I don't think it has quite as much staying power in my own personal rotation as Galaxian, especially since that depth doesn't extend to the scoring system, which awards flat amounts of points for each type of obstacle destroyed and doesn't offer anything in the way of extra lives, but it's undeniably exciting and, at a base level, kinesthetically pleasing to be simply engrossing. All in all, an excellent addition to the classic arcade pantheon.