showing 1 game
| name | publisher(developer) | year arrow_downward | description | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blaster | Atari (Vid Kidz) | 1984 | CX-52xx (no product number). Prototype. North America NTSC. 1 player only. Pilot your Blastership against the robots in this 1st person 3D space shooter. Rescue the humans and shoot anything else that moves. You have limited shielding (an energy bar). There are 4 stages. Robot Grid, Time Tunnel, Outer Space, and Planetoids. Robot Grid is filled with archways, robots, and walls. Shoot the robots, fly through the archways, avoid colliding with walls. At higher difficulty levels, robot plains will make kamikaze attacks on this stage. In the Time Tunnel are many humans that have been lost in time disasters. Collect these survivors from the past for bonus points. There are no enemies in this stage. In Outer Space you will encounter many types of robots. Xitan Mineships will zip in close and scatter mines in you path. Z-15 Fitershipz (TIE Fighters) will blast you with lasers in head-on attacks. Destructor Satellites are fast and huge. They fire lasers. Death Riders look like skeletons on a rockets. They will try to blast you with lasers before making kamikaze attacks. Planetoids is another time tunnel but it is filled with tiny moving planets. Avoid colliding with them. Robot saucers will also be hidden behind these planetoids. Purple Saucers will shoot at you. Red Saucers will make kamikaze attacks. There are more humans stranded here. These humans have gathered along the route to an Energizer to guide you to it. You can rescue them on the way there. An Energizer also has a locater beacon and you will hear beeps as you get closer. It looks like an "E" completely restores your ship and returns you to another Robot Grid. Each time you start over in this way, the difficulty will increase. Controls: Push up to pitch your craft up, and down for down. (this is opposite of most flight sims) Scoring: Threading archways is worth 1000 points. A 1000 point bonus is added for each archway threaded in succession (1st is 1000, 2nd is 1000+1000, 3rd is 1000+2000, etc.) Destroying robots is worth 100 points. A 100 point bonus is added for each robot destroyed in succession (1st is 100, 2nd is 100+100, 3rd is 100+200, etc.) The maximum bonus is 3000. Kamikazes are worth the most points if you wait till the last moment to shoot them. This is in addition to succession bonuses. Rescuing humans is worth 1000 points. A 100 point bonus is added for each human rescued in succession (1st is 1000, 2nd is 1000+100, 3rd is 1000+200, etc...) The maximum bonus is 2000. Trivia: This game was designed by Atari as an unofficial sequel to [game=Robotron 2084]Robotron 2084[/game] for the Atari 8-bit computer. Atari had access to the license from [company=Williams]Williams[/company]. When the specs for the 5200 were finalized, the porting effort began. Only after the 5200 prototype of the game was shown to Williams did they become interested in making an [game=#22]arcade version[/game] of it. The home versions were delayed since Williams felt 'Arcade versions should always come first'. The [game=#108369]Atari 8-bit version[/game] was finished first then the 5200 version was finished. The [game=#22]arcade port[/game] was finished last and 500 units were released in 1983. The 5200 version was planned for 1984 but this was not in time to beat the videogame market crash. There is only one known prototype of 5200 Blaster. It contains a finished version of the game; fully ready for publishing. The prototype is an unusually large, unlabeled, bare EPROM board with 5 chips. 4 of these chips have "2084" on their labels. These are actually left over chips from the development of Robotron: 2084.[spoiler= ; ][/spoiler] [Zerothis] | labelimagesubject |
