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Comment by doodlebugging | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. The anticipation you felt knowing that you were a carefully timed shot away from being attacked by the spaceship; the feature that allowed you to shoot past the edge of the screen and hit rocks before they crossed the edge in front of you; the sad feeling seeing your ship in fragments and the frantic check of the screen to see how many you had left.

Awesome game.

It definitely is not the same on the emulator but it is still a huge amount of fun. There are so many ways to play - try to stay in one spot for as long as possible blasting rocks; spend the entire time moving and blasting everything as you pass hoping for the best; sit and spin firing randomly in that instant before the spaceship appears on the off chance that your wild shot may hit it.

I also love Galaga. I was so glad to see that on the Roku. We still play that game regularly.

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oh boy, can't believe i am going to do this. but. if there is one topic i am qualified to write about, it is asteroids.

in my early twenties, i was good enough that i could play for hours. i could have like 50 or 60 extra ships piled up, going all the way across the screen. my longest game on a single quarter was nine hours. i finally had to stop because i was hallucinating.

based on that, i can say for certain that, no, there is only one right way to play, assuming you want to get good enough that the game can't get rid of you.

first, you have to get really good at flying your ship around. you must use the flight mechanic to your best advantage, so you can position that ship as easily as you can drive a car.

second, you have to get good at hunting the small saucers. i knew several good players who used different strategies, but the most reliable was to get rid of most of the rocks, fly slowly left to right across the screen, and learn how to "strafe." you were allowed a maximum of four bullets onscreen at once. you have to learn to press the fire button so quickly that all four of them line up together, which you gracefully place in the path of an oncoming saucer, so that it has no choice but to fly into your sheet of bullets.

i can't play the game at all anymore. my reaction times have gotten way too slow. also, after about 30 minutes, the tendons in my wrists start to hurt. the game makes you hold your hands in a very unnatural way.

i exchanged emails with ed logg once. he offered to sell me his original prototype asteroids machine, the one he developed the game on. i was not interested. i love the game and all, but not enough to haul around a 600-pound boat anchor for the rest of my life.

You are the king! I could line up a sizable collection of expendable ships but nothing like that. Nine hours would definitely not have been a 25 cent adventure for me.

Your method of staying alive sounds a lot like mine. Make good use of salvos, follow the rocks as they near the edge of the screen while blasting them and just before they reach the edge pivot to face the emerging edge and begin blasting so that many never made the jump. Also, when you get down to the last couple of rocks just put yourself behind them moving in the same direction as you destroy them and accelerate as the last one falls. Then use a slow fan salvo as you rotate and glide to try to score the spaceship but get ready for a quick pivot if you're out of position.

I also am not near as fast on the uptake but that doesn't keep me from getting caught up in it. I have a Wii, an XBox360, numerous pc games and a Steam account, and that Atari emulator. Asteroids is always a favorite. I'll never forget the awesome feeling I had when I sat down to an Apple IIc in my first college computer science programming class and started following the simple instructions we had been given to draw an object and move it around on the screen in Logo or Turtle or something like that.

I was getting a glimpse of the process behind making a game like Asteroids and I went from a person who had no interest in anything having to do with computers to someone who has now spent his life in an industry that depends on high performance computing.

oddly enough, i also wrote an asteroids clone, in C for DOS, using VGA graphics. i am not mathematically inclined, so writing the routines that allowed the ship to act exactly as it did in the original, subject to friction and thrust, nearly killed me. i’ve still got the code around here somewhere.

The dial turning to position the ship was a wrist killer after a few hours.

I liked Megaroids too on the Atari ST!

asteroids did not have a dial. you must be thinking of some other game.

Maybe Blasteroids, the 1987 sequel?

That development cabinet is in a museum now in upstate NY.

huh, i always wondered about that! he seemed in a pretty big hurry to unload it at the time. i suggested some people who might actually want it, but i didn’t email with him for very long.

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