In today's look at Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1, released by Code Mystics on the Nintendo DS back in 2010, we look at games that focus on outer space. Being the 1980s, I would have thought that there would have been more games in the Space category, but there were several games like Asteroids, Lunar Lander, and Gravitar that could have been here instead if they were not already in other categories. So we have just two games here today and just a quick heads up that the pictures I took with are a little blurry (for Star Ship) and washed out and low contrast (for Stellar Track). Both games are a lot easier to read on the 3DS screen which is why that is something that I do not openly discuss in my review for either game. So let us get to them.
Star Ship
Star Ship surprised me a bit. I was not expecting a first-person space shooter like this, but something closer to either Battlezone or Submarine Commander. Here, you can fly both left and right as well as up and down with inverted y-axis controls with ships to shoot down and obstacles to dodge. Granted the gameplay itself was pretty rudimentary, but I still intuitively knew what I was doing and how to play the game. The primary thing was after reading the manual to recognize asteroids which you just have to avoid as they are invincible, unlike every other object on the screen flying at you. I was even able to play three different games, with two having different mechanics altogether.
First, there was the primary Star Ship mode which is the first-person space shooter. You fly through space shooting objects that fly at you before they either collide with your ship or you pass them by scoring as many points in the 2 minutes 16 seconds the game gives you to play. The Slow Obstacles mode felt a little too slow, but it was a great introduction to the game. The Fast Obstacles was a little bit more of a challenge and I got a grasp on how best to shoot the various alien ships flying at me and how to completely avoid the asteroids. In the Warp Drive mode, I played on Dual Obstacles, so there were two obstacles on the screen most of the time, but in this mode, you do not have guns and you just have to avoid everything. The button simply increases your speed, which means you can cover more ground (and get a higher score) in the 2m16s, but at the risk of colliding with an obstacle with a significantly shorter reaction time.
The Lunar Lander mode was a completely different game altogether, not even using the same perspective as either Star Ship or Warp Drive. Instead, you have to avoid objects floating in space while you land your lander on the floating moon/asteroid. I was a little afraid that this was going to be as complicated and frustrating as Gravitar or Lunar Lander, but the mechanics were pretty simple in that you just had to press the button when you were in close proximity to the moon and you landed. Then you repeated the process after a second, with the point to score as many landings with as few obstacle collisions in the time allotted.
The modes here are pretty simple, but simple was a lot of fun in this case.
Verdict: Yes.
- Game 1: [1-Player Star Ship, Slow Obstacles] 32
- Game 2: [1-Player Star Ship, Fast Obstacles] 14
- Game 3: [1-Player Warp Drive, Dual Obstacles] 15
- Game 4: [1-Player Lunar Lander, Slow, Obstacles] 15
Stellar Track
Who-boy! The instruction manual to this game was a bit beyond intimidating, almost akin to the manual to Submarine Commander. You are told that you should keep the manual handy while you play the game so you can reference how to access certain menus because specific menus are only accessible on either the right or left joystick (meaning you scroll through menus by pressing the joystick either left or right and the right side has specific menus that are not on the left side; again, a lot of the descriptions in the manual are a lot more complicated than how the game actually operates). I was a bit worried because as I have mentioned before, you cannot save your game to go back an look at the manual in the menu which meant that I would have to pull up the manual on my phone or computer while playing.
You are also told to know how/when the best time to use Short Range scans versus Long Range Scans, is because the energy output required costs more for an LRS than an SRS, and a specific situation may not be the best to run one scan over the other. The manual also tells you that when engaging alien ships, it is best to have a pencil and paper (and calculator?) to "calculate the minimum energy required to destroy Aliens." All of this attention on energy usage is because how much energy/fuel you have left at the end of the game is part of how your final score is determined. If you do destroy all of the aliens but have used up the majority of your energy stores, you will receive a much lower score/ranking than if you are conservative with how you travel/scan/attack. Very intimidating coming from the last group of games I played.
The game itself is both not as complicated as the manual makes it out to be, and needlessly complicated regarding how you move your ship through space; both sector space, and quadrant space. Movement is determined by which direction you want to take your ship into warp, but you need to know the layout of which quadrant you are in (by performing a short-range scan) and if there are any obstacles in the way in the direction you want to warp as you cannot warp through a sun. How you direct your ship is where the needlessly complicated part comes in. Because the game is presented in columns and rows, such as being in Sector 4,5 or Quadrant 5,8 so it would make sense that you should be able to enter your coordinates in a way that would make sense, such as wanting to move to Sector 5,4. However, to move from Sector 4,5 to Sector 5,4, you would enter coordinates 2,1. But only if there was not a sun in your path, then you would need to move around it.
Battle against alien ships was a little confusing, partly because of the small screen size and the sudden "red alert" coloring, but also because directing your photon torpedoes ended up being similar to how you select your warp destination. The trade-off is that if you fire torpedoes, you have to target the enemy ships yourself and if you are off by even one digit then you will miss. If you fire with your phasors, you are guaranteed to hit, but in turn, you will use up more energy which will already be depleted when you use your warp drive to reposition your ship to be able to attack. Then when you are hit by alien fire, which happens any time they are in your quadrant and you perform a short or long-range scan, you again lose energy. There is a fine line to battles that I feel I have yet to master but feels somewhat manageable, but I have never been in a quadrant that had more than three alien ships in it.
The two games I played were not nearly as confusing as I had originally feared, and even with the overly confusing way of navigating and firing weapons, I oddly enough thought the game was more fun than I had feared. The first game took just about seven minutes before I ran out of energy and the second only lasted just over four minutes because I found myself boxed in by three suns in difficult-to-navigate locations; apparently, you use up energy when you try to warp, and are blocked by a sun. Really, if the navigating and firing had been simplified to just entering grid coordinates instead of direction and number of spaces, Stellar Track would have been a lot easier to say that this was a Yes game. As it stands, it is more of a weak Yes, but one that I would likely come back to in order to have another go at it.
Verdict: Yes
- Game 1: Surrender to the Aliens / Cadet
- Game 2: Surrender to the Aliens / Cadet
I did appreciate that both of the Space games were significantly different from one another and amongst the two games, there were three different types of games.
In the next series of games, we start on March 10th, and we will be three weeks of sports games. So if you are a sports fan or someone who likes to read about antiquated sports video games from 35+ years ago, we will have a lot for you to digest.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Beware Humans
Beware Humans
P.S. Stellar Track was the last game I played, being the most intimidating game in the collection due to how unconventional it was. I did start it earlier than the Sports games, but after seeing what I was in for amounted to a pen/paper-type resource management space-sim, I backed out and came back to it last. I think that is partially why my review of it is so much longer than just two paragraphs. It could also be why I ended up with such a favorable opinion of such a strange game. It definitely has that getting dads into video games who would never play Pac-Man energy.
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