Asteroids rocks
If you have never listened to me before, then listen now. I am about to tell you about the greatest game there ever was and ever will be; Also why a syphilitic, 19th century philosopher, who ushered in a godless age and shagged his own sister, could easily kick your arse at it.
The home version of
Asteroids remains a classic of game design. An arrow-shaped ship using its laser to shatter lumbering chunks of space debris into smaller, faster-moving pieces, which it subsequently reduces to cosmic dust. This orgy of galactic quarrying is broken only by the arrival of the occasional flying saucer. These come in two varieties. A large, SUV-style saucer that will often conveniently steer itself into the nearest asteroid. And a smaller saucer, capable of picking you off, if you linger too long in the same spot.
While the arcade version of
Asteroids introduced basic colours to the vector graphics, the game never looked more majestic than when rendered in monochrome. The classic appearance of the title is matched by its playability. No game before or since has used simplicity to such addictive effect.
“Hang on a minute,” cry whatever the collective noun is for a group of nerdish, barely human, sci-fi nerds with extremely poor personal hygiene. "What about
Tetris?!?
Tetris is way more simple and addictive than
Asteroids.”
Ah, my virginal, parent’s-basement-dwelling friends: First of all I doubt that any of you have removed your copy of
Tetris from its original shrink-wrap for fear of damaging it’s worth as a future collector’s item. And secondly:
NO.
Now pay attention:
Tetris is what happens after decades of Communist indoctrination squeezes every last iota of individuality out of a person, until their brain is compressed an easily stackable cube. All your
Tetris high-score proves is a predisposition towards conformity, coupled with an ability for filing. People with any kind of aptitude for this game enjoy eating Soylent green and think that Fox News provides fair and balanced coverage of world events.
Asteroids, on the other hand, requires such mad skillz that I am left with no option other than to spell ‘skills’ with a ‘Z’ instead of an ‘S’.
Asteroids is not suitable for whining bitches
The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote at length on the subject of dying at the right time. If Nietzsche was alive today and playing
Asteroids he would make your high-score look like small change.
Die at the wrong time in
Asteroids and you will pay a heavy price. If the screen is still teeming with space debris, your ship may teleport back into the game just in time for a rock to plough into it. Or it may reappear just as the small saucer passes the centre of the screen and effortlessly picks you off.
Of course, there is always the hyperspace key (Shift) – the ultimate get-out clause - which teleports your ship to a random location but often leaves you in the direct path of an asteroid, with no time to react.
Once, having built-up a healthy stock of seven lives, I suddenly lost four of them, all in the space of about 20 seconds. Did I cry like a bitch? No, I did not. Asteroids, like life, is often unfair. I once considered setting up a support forum for people who felt that they had been hard done by
Asteroids. Then I was going to find out where they all lived and pelt them with rocks.
Asteroids acknowledges the tenets of modern astrophysics
It is generally thought that the action of gravity on space/time causes it to become curved. The upshot of this theory is a widely held belief that if a spaceship were to keep on travelling in the same direction, it would eventually return to its point of origin. In
Asteroids if your ship leaves one side of the screen, it will emerge on the other side in an eloquent summation of curved space/time theory.
Critics of the game (mostly, it has to be said,
Tetris fans) have pointed out that, apart from the asteroids, there are no large objects visible on-screen with sufficient mass to create the gravity that would cause space to warp and curve.
What this demonstrates to me is that the creators of the game were proponents of invisible dark matter as the prevailing source of gravity in the universe. It is a testimony to the far-sightedness of these programmers who, as they laboured in their secret government lab beneath the Catskills in the late 1970s, were willing to stake their reputations on, what was at the time, a controversial theory.
You can play Asteroids now!*
*subject to board member status
You can! Right here on Rob’s boards! In the arcade room! The current high scorer – Technical Blog - is actually a Great Horned Owl, which professors at the Cybernetics Department of Reading University have wired-up to a PC in an attempt to create the ultimate online gamer. While the results are impressive, his status as an animal disqualifies him for consideration in the top 10.
I was also shocked to discover that all Emperor Joker’s scores thus far have been custom-built by a nest of internet dwelling ants who run a successful dot.com business.
This sorry mix of corruption and tampering with the natural order of things leaves me in an unreachable position at the summit of the leader board, where I predict I will remain forever. If you do appear to beat me, it is probably an optical illusion.
