'I'm remaking and opensourcing relevant classic videogames. Which one I should feature in my work?' A surprisingly (and relatively) high number of people answered buzzing 'that game where you shoot at asteroids...'. Well. No long investigations needed: it's our classic Asteroids (1979).

Citing 'Asteroids' as one of the best games of the past gives you such an aura of videogame hipster sommelier, with your hand waving a big glass full of the best Shenmue (1999). Come on. Asteroids was the american Space Invaders, and, despite it surpassed the Taito masterpiece in USA, it is still the game where you shoot at asteroids.

Okay, stop joking. Asteroids was a very good vector-based shooter and its aesthetics is still an Atari trademark. Even in sci-fi movies sometime futuristic videogames are depicted more like Asteroids than like pixel-based games. Moreover, it sported a good physics model - at least for the time - which was predictable and became, together with his top-down view, a distinguishable gameplay element in other games.

Element that I personally never liked.

I have already put Asteroids like gamelay in space battle scenes of that No Man's Sky demake I have done long ago, so I was dropping the idea of implementing it again. But I'm taking the chance of proposing another game concept I can't play very well but I like so much: caravan SHMUPS.

Caravan SHMUPS are shooters played for score and for a limited time period, from 2 to 5 minutes. It can feature a story but, in most of the case, are games in which you have to rack as many points as you can and as fast as you can. These game were a real huge hit in Japan. From mid-80s to mid-90s the videogames company Hudson together with other companies held an event called Hudson Caravan: during these events elementary school children from every part of Japan, from pros to total newbies, competed in these furious time-limited shooters. Qualifying matches took two minutes and the final rounds five and the event even appeared in newspapers and the evening news. Do you ever wondered why Japanese are so good in bullet hell SHMUP? Well... you probably have a proprer answer now!

Plot!

The earth is in danger! A whole belt of asteroids is going to crash on our planet and, this time, there is nothing to do for saving it! Waiting for their last minutes of life, humans decided to organize the Rockany Festival, a reality show in which spaceship constructors competes each other for the best asteroid-breaking machine. Choose your ship, go to space and break anything within the time limit!

In spaceship selector, use UP/DOWN for changing model, A BUTTON for confirming and the B BUTTON for going back to the title screen. Move your ship using LEFT/RIGHT for rotating, UP for accelerating and DOWN for braking. Use the A BUTTON for firing - but remember that each ship have its own control scheme!

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Install / Add to home View game sources ...or play it online below!