#0033 Gravitar

 Alright, finally! So, for those who don't remember, I am currently working my way through the book “1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die”. Not just reading it, but actually treating it like a video game bucket list. As a recovering Nintendo Fanboy, I missed out on some amazing games from the past three decades. I intend on making up for that by playing every amazing game from every generation and then documenting my experiences. So, for this article, I'm reviewing Atari's smash hit “Gravitar”.

Remember when I said I didn't much care for Asteroids? And then I thought Lunar Lander was frustratingly unfair? Well what happens when you put those two games together? That's right! You get Gravitar, a 1982 SHMUP (I just learned that word, way easier to type than “Shoot 'em Up”).

In this game you play as the ship from Asteroids, your goal is to travel the solar system and kill all the turrets on all the planets, while avoiding attacks from the flying saucers and other enemy ships. There are two basic screens, there's the overworld screen, There are five different planets of various difficulty, a starting point, (which I think is supposed to be the sun, but I can't tell, vector graphics may be clean, but they're not exactly detail oriented.) and some sort of pointy planet that kills you if you get too close. Guess which planet you gravitate to at the start of the game? Yeah the spiky one, of course, so that means that you'll die right at the beginning if you’re not careful, and when I first started the game I wasn't sure which button was thrust so I lost a life just trying to figure out which button I should press not to die. So you fly around the overworld screen, avoiding the spiky planet, and other enemy ships if you get too close to an enemy ship, the screen changes into some sort of battlescreen where you must kill the enemy ship in order to continue, when you fly close to a planet, then the map changes to a closeup of that planet (which usually looks nothing like the overworld planet). At this point, the game looks less like Asteroids and more like Lunar Lander with bullets. You're job it to avoid crashing on the surface of the planet, avoid the bullet barrage from the enemy turrets, and avoid the fire of enemy ships (they can actually follow you into the closeup map, very clever, cool feature), and kill every enemy turret until the planet is cleared. Then you move on to the next planet.

This game is hard, most of the difficulty comes from the game's physics, which are quite realistic, a lot like Asteroids, I often found that most of my deaths didn't come at the expense of enemy ships, but from crashing into some sort of planetary terrain, especially on the 9000 point planet you can see on the left.

But the most important question is, is the game good? Eh, not really. It's not bad like Gorf was, and admittedly it was funner than either Asteroids or Lunar Lander by themselves. It just didn't leave a huge impression on me. The physics are great, very realistic, the overworld and planetary maps are a good and smart feature, and is something that would still be used in a game like this today. And the enemies following you in real time into the planets is cool as well, but overall, I wouldn’t come back to it too much. But it's okay for what it's trying to do.

With that said welcome to 1982! The last year of the Golden Age of Arcade Games. Some promising games are ahead for this year, even a bonus game that's not on the list will be included this year due to popular demand. The ColecoVision releases this year as well as the Intelevision to Europe and Japan after it's release in 1979 in the US. Unfortunately, this is also the year we start to see an influx of crap games from third party companies to the 2600, and the noticeable decline in quality from Atari's arcade games (which is evident even in this game). But the crash isn't for another year, so until then, let's grab some quarters and celebrate like it's 1982!

Up next: Joust