An excellent arcade-style shooter, Caverns of Mars is a downward-scrolling game where players must pilot their craft through a series of five underground levels filled with alien ships, narrow passageways and a variety of obstacles, including blue diamonds, force field barriers and floating space mines. Fuel must be collected along the way, and at the bottom of the last level a Martian base must be destroyed. Horizontal sections provide variety, scrolling is smooth, and the fast paced, though methodical shooting action is intensely enjoyable, making this a truly addictive game.
In this Space Invaders variant, the player controls a gun turret at the bottom of the screen and fires missiles at incoming alien ships. The turret can move both left and right and hide behind three protective barriers. The alien invaders move left and right, fire missiles at the player, and slowly approach the planet surface - if they land, the player loses the game. Every once in a while, an alien mothership will fly across the top of the screen and shooting it will give the player extra points. The goal of the game is to destroy all alien ships in each attacking wave and score as many points as possible. The game ends when players lose their three lives.
A simulation of the five-card draw poker variant. There is a computerized dealer and two more players (human or computer-controlled), and each one is dealt five cards. The players then take turns either calling or raising a bet (of up to $25) or, if they don't like their cards, they can fold. Once that round of betting is done, players can then choose to discard up to three of their cards in exchange for new ones, in an attempt to make a better hand. Another round of betting then takes place and, after that, all the players that didn't fold must show their cards. Whoever has the highest hand wins all the money in the pot.
Set in the year 2003, the game involves using a spaceship to destroy enemy droid ships. The player's ship is controlled with a spinner to rotate the ship, a button for thrusting, and a button for firing lasers. The enemies that the player must destroy or avoid are drone ships, commander ships, two types of space mines, and shooting star ships. The ship bounces off an invisible barrier on the edges of the screen that briefly appears when hit. By default, Extra ships are awarded at 40,000 and 100,000 points, but this can be changed by the machine's owner.
This text adventue is the conclusion of Savage Island, Part I. You are still trying to find the secret of the island in the pacifuc ocean. A code sheet which came with game will enable you to solve mystery concerning the island.
You are on a moon-based scouting mission in a Mark 16 Starcruiser. Suddenly, enemy alien ships teleport in and start firing neutron missiles, which can destroy you upon impact. You must destroy enemy ships until reinforcements arrive from Earth. The enemy also have laser-directed heat-seeking proton missiles which are fired sparingly. Be aware that as the battle progresses, the aliens will become more desperate and will use the laser-directed heat-seeking proton missiles more often.
As a commander of a spaceship you explore an unknown planet and are soon attacked by its inhabitants - the Electrosauri. You are shot at from above as well as from the sides and it becomes increasingly difficult to fend off the attackers the further the game progresses. The game allows the player to play several variations (e.g. difficulty level, number of enemies on screen, attack patterns etc.).
As the captain of a boat the player has to rescue as many drowning people in one of the nine rivers as possible while at the same time dodging obstacles like other boats, TNT, the shore, dirftwood etc. There is a time limit to the task since your boat is leaking and will eventually sink. Hitting obstacles like alligators and whirlpools increases the amount of water the boat takes in.
Threshold is a typical shoot 'em up that places the player's spaceship at the bottom of the screen where he has to fend of the enemy. If the player misses an enemy and he reaches the opposite side of the screen he will reappear on the other side of the screen again. This goes on as long as the player has destroyed all enemy ships and the game progresses into the next stage with enemies approaching in a different attack pattern. Needless to say that contact with an enemy projectile or an enemy itself results in losing a life.
In this text adventure it is the player's goal to reach the red planet that gloomily hangs above its alter ego's head. Contrary to most text adventures of its time the player does not use directions like north, south, up etc. to maneuver through the game world. Instead he gives instructions to head to a specific location. Therefore the player has the ability to look ahead. Clues to the solution of the game are hidden in a poem which came along with the game.
Stellar Track is a text- and turn-based strategy game where the player controls a Terran Super Warship that must clear out alien ships from all quadrants of a galaxy. It was a conversion of a college mainframe Star Trek game released by Sears in 1981. It is a suitably primitive game where you have to run scans to locate enemies and starbases on a 6 x 6 galactic map. You run scans to find the enemies then must warp to their quadrant to confront them with either phasers or photon torpedoes. You use the joystick to determine the numerals of where you intend you to travel to.
Freeway is a video game designed by David Crane for the Atari 2600 video game console. It was published by Activision in 1981. One or two players control chickens who can be made to run across a ten lane highway filled with traffic in an effort to "get to the other side." Every time a chicken gets across a point is earned for that player. If hit by a car, a chicken is forced back either slightly, or pushed back to the bottom of the screen, depending on what difficulty the switch is set to. The winner of a two player game is the player who has scored the most points in the two minutes, sixteen seconds allotted. The chickens are only allowed to move up or down. A cluck sound is heard when a chicken is struck by a car. Comparisons are often made to Frogger, which has also features crossing a street filled with moving vehicles. Similarities did help sales when Frogger was popular in the arcades and a home version was not yet available.
Freeway was made available on Microsoft's Game Room service for its Xbox 360 consol
The object of Laser Blast is to destroy a series of land-based enemies. The player controls a fleet of flying saucers, operating one at a time. On the planet surface below are a group of three mobile laser bases, guarded by an invisible force field that prevents the player's saucer from getting too close to the surface. Both the player and the enemy bases are armed with laser blasters, which may fire a single continuous beam at a time. If the player's saucer is hit, it will lose altitude and crash to the ground; however, the player may direct this fall, potentially into one of the bases, destroying it as well. Each succeeding wave of enemy bases moves faster and targets the player's saucers more quickly, while the force field becomes stronger and decreases the amount of space in which the saucer can move. Players score points for each base destroyed, with points multiplying each wave up to a maximum of 90 points per base. Players earn extra flying saucers with each 1000 points scored and may keep a maximum of six e
Arcade shooter where you protect humans from being captured by aliens. Created by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, it is a sequel to Defender which was released earlier in the year. Some home ports of Stargate were renamed to Defender II for legal reasons.
Crazy Kong is an arcade game created by Falcon, released in 1981 and is similar to Nintendo's Donkey Kong. Although commonly mistaken as a bootleg version, the game is officially licensed for non-US markets and is based on different hardware.
The game retains all of the gameplay elements of Donkey Kong, but has all of the graphics redrawn and re-colorized. They were allowed to produce a certain amount of printed circuit boards (PCB) and were banned from exporting them. Falcon breached this agreement by producing more than 9000 excess units and also by exporting them to the US. On January 29, 1982, Nintendo terminated their license agreement.
It had a second version called Crazy Kong Part II.
Kaboom! is an unauthorized adaptation of the 1978 Atari coin-op Avalanche. The gameplay of both games is fundamentally the same, but Kaboom! was re-themed to be about a mad bomber instead of falling rocks.
Gameplay in Kaboom! consists of using a paddle controller to catch bombs dropped by the Mad Bomber with a set of three buckets. Points are scored for every bomb caught, extra buckets (maximum of three) are awarded at every 1,000 points, and one bucket is lost every time a bomb is missed. As the game progresses, the "Mad Bomber" traverses the top of the screen much more erratically, dropping bombs at increasingly higher speeds, making each of the seven higher levels more difficult.
Gorf actually consists in the Arcade version of five different types of space shooters. The first one ist basically is a Space Invaders clone. In the second one a formation of space ships is hovering at the top of the screen while single space ships will disengage from the formation and dive down at you. The third variant is a Glaxian clone and only available in the Arcade version. In the fourth mini-game the enemy will come out of a circular hyperspace field and attack you. After having destroyed four of your attackers the game proceeds to the fifth game stage. Here a huge mothership is dropping bombs at you from the top of the screen. You defeat the mothership with a well placed projectile hitting it between its two major sections. After that the game starts from the gebinning on a higher difficulty level.