REVIEW

AT 6,8; "ZERO ASTEROIDS II"

Reviewer: Demon
Developer: MatGubbins
Genre: Avoid-em-up
Platform: Spectrum 48K
Language: BASIC

Asteroids was released in 1979 by Atari and designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg. The player controls a spaceship and the object of the game is to shoot and destroy asteroids and flying saucers while not colliding with either. It's widely regarded as a bit of a gaming classic.

Zero Asteroids was release in 2014 by MatGubbins. The player controls a spaceship but, mysteriously, the asteroids and flying saucers were missing and I suggested that the gameplay element was somewhat lacking.

Still, this is a crap games competition, and Zero Asteroids certainly ticked that box so I was quite surprised when MatG took the unusual move of reworking his original game and improving on it in a number of areas. (Bonkers!? - Ed)

So you return to the controls of your 45° rotationally locked UDG spaceship, only this time, someone's jammed a brick on the accelerator and you can't stop moving!

MatG's added some obstacles in the shape of simple magenta ASCII asterisk mines. Hit one of these bad boys and it's game over - which is surprising easy to do given the speed at which your ship is moving and the dodgy O/P controls.

As if avoiding the mines wasn't perilous enough there's also your rapidly depleting fuel banks to contend with.

Luckily you've dropped out of the Asteroid field in an area with a constantly regenerating fuel supply - represented by a simple 'F' - but you need to constantly hunt it down for fear of running out and being left to drift in space hoping only for a salvage ship to find you (and not to eject your lifeless body into the cold of space just so they can nick your supplies!)

Inevitably you'll lose your nerve (or hit the wrong key) and end up crashing into a mine. Unfortunately this ends the game, however, you are rewarded with a beautifully realised ASCII explosion for which I was compelled to break into the BASIC code and check how it was done.

I'm not sure what MatGubbins was thinking and it looks like I owe R Tape another gift through the post, however, I'm oddly pleased that Zero Asteroids II found its way to my inbox.

As the HI(gh) score finally serves a purpose I naturally spent a good thirty minutes trying and trying to beat it! I crashed quite a lot and got to 90 a frustrating number of times before, eventually, I did it!

140 is the score on the doors. I reckon it'll be about an hour before someone beats it.

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