Star Raiders

The Good
For a game released in the late 70s, this is an absolutely mindblowing piece of work, particularly for something that fits into an 8K ROM cartridge! It has also stood the test of time very well.

The graphics were impressive for the time, and given the technical limitations of the hardware on which it runs, are still impressive today. The framerate is incredible, only when there are explosions on screen do you get a chance to take a breath, the rest of the time everything is moving so fast you really have to keep your wits about you.

The sound also suits this title well, and while there isn't that much to hear, what there is suits the mood perfectly. There is no music, but that wouldn't suit the serious tone of this title. What there is is what is needed - the sound of your photon torpedos firing, the sound of your ion drive pushing you through space, the sound of your hyperdrive warping you to a new sector for yet more frantic action, the sound of alarms going off as you enter a sector containing enemy craft, and of course, the satisfying sound of an enemy craft exploding!

I love how everything happens in real time - you snooze, you will lose, from the moment you start the game the Zylon craft are on the attack, trying to sorround and then destroy your precious star bases, which it is your task to defend.

The tactical element is fantastic too - do you risk disabling your shields when you think you won't need them to conserve energy? How will you attack the enemy Zylon craft?

The Bad
There is very little I don't like about this game. About the only room for improvement as far as I am concerned was the difficulty curve - choose NOVICE and it's far too easy, yet PILOT, WARRIOR & COMMANDER are much tougher and even those who can easily complete a NOVICE mission will probably struggle to get better then a ROOKIE rating in any skill level higher then novice - if they finish at all!

The Bottom Line
The original and best 3D space shooter, defend your star bases, destroy the invading zylon attack fleet, and do it quickly, because the clock is ticking!

The Good
Star Raiders burst onto the scene in 1982, and for this young eleven-year-old it was the answer to a dream. Fantastic sci-fi movies such as STAR WARS and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA had fired the imagination with vivid images of fighters blasting at one another in deep space, but until Star Raiders (and it's more primitive Activision counterpart StarMaster) space combat simulations were limited to glorified shooting galleries (STAR FIRE, TAIL GUNNER), 2-dimensional enemies-at-the-top-you-at-the-bottom games (GALAGA, PHOENIX), and games in which the user could shoot anything on screen, but the movement of the ship was as tightly controlled as a railroad engine (STAR WARS).

Into this morass came Star Raiders, which allowed for the first time a budding pilot to fly literally anywhere in the game universe. Further, it used a pseudo-3D flight model in which "Up", "Down", "Above", "Behind" all had meaning. In no other game at the time was it possible for one enemy fighter to distract you while another came up behind and blindsided you with a weapon. The feeling of freedom and of being in an honest-to-goodness spacecraft was unbelievable.

In addition, the game provided a number of other advanced features which would make it the most advanced space combat sim until the advent of ELITE in the late 80s/early nineties. Among them:

-- Individual ship components which could be damaged or destroyed. -- Control of multiple ship systems including shields, two computers, a sublight throttle and a hyperdrive. -- Tracking of ship movement within the local "sector" and in the larger "galaxy" in real-time. -- Strategic considerations, and the ability to destroy your own starbases to prevent the enemy gaining advantage from them. -- An advanced HUD indicating position of targets not in your immediate vicinity. -- "Guided" weapons (after a weapon was fired, moving the joystick would also change the course of the weapon, allowing one to "steer" it into distant targets). -- Different types of enemies with different capabilities and different attack profiles. -- Detailed energy management, each action having a corresponding cost in fuel, requiring careful management and planning. -- The presence of starbases (and utility tugs), which had to be defended and docked with.

All in all, an astonishing game, not only for the incredible level of detail and gameplay, but also that it was unequalled for nearly seven years.


The Bad
Even today, but especially for its time, it was a complex game. The Atari 5200 I played it on provided a 12-key phone touchpad with the joystick and Star Raiders used all 12 buttons, many of them mapped to more than one function. A failure of any of the keys meant that the game was unplayable. The interface was also somewhat difficult, as there were a number of things that had to be done very quickly on entering an enemy-occupied sector and all of it on the keypad.

It was also a game that could not be played without reading the instruction manual. This was the age before in-game tutorials; if you simply plugged it in and started flying, you would accomplish nothing and run out of gas. Even with the manual, some tasks such as docking with a starbase to replenish were non-trivial exercises that took practice to get right.

For an average person that had no interest in space, these difficulties may have made the game unplayable; for an eleven-year-old space enthusiast, they were nitpicks barely worthy of mention.


The Bottom Line
An excellent space-combat game -- still playable, even today.

The Good

It's a race against the clock: The bad guys jump across grid sectors of the system, heading your bases. Your job is to intercept them all. If you spend too long finding the wrong route, or have trouble shooting enemy ships when you intercept them, then at best your final rank will decrease, and at worst, you'll be too late to prevent the other enemy fleets from attacking your base ships elsewhere.

The very best thing about this game is the "I can just do this one more bit" tug that makes you commit too far, with the price being complete failure. Of course that might just be because I wasn't very good at it :o)

To help your game, you have the 'galaxy map', which is a grid showing friendly and enemy occupation, where you can select your next hyperspace destination. You also have a 'long range scanner' view of the immediate area, where all objects rotate in 3D as your ship moves and turns.

Skill and accuracy do play a large part in the game: when jumping between sectors, you must keep a wobbly cursor centred in the crosshairs - this wobbling increases with the distance of your jump, so you have to be good to pull those off to be on target and land in the thick of the action as quickly as possible. Also, fast accurate shooting is rewarded with a good rank at the end.

Graphically, despite being mostly three shades of green at most, this game stood out, especially with its smooth and detailed starfields, full-screen rotating 3D scanner view, and frame-fast enemy sprites. It really is a very technically accomplished piece of programming, and a well balanced game, despite the limitations of the time.

A few aspects of the game are just pure luck: If you happen to find the tougher class of enemy ship, your game is made much more difficult, and unless you're really good, your ranking will suffer as a result.

While in an occupied sector, the computer hardware limitations mean that you could only take on one or two enemy ships at once. This leads to a predictable 'queuing' of enemies if you take a while to dispatch the first.

The cryptic ranking system at the end of the game means you don't really know how well you did. Thankfully, it's obvious if you're rated as "Garbage Scow Captain" - pretty obviously a justified insult in response to playing a poor game!