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How common was the later revision (small saucer fires immediately when it appears, and can aim at you across the wrap around) compared to the original?

MAME makes the newest revision the 'default' (in terms of their ROM naming) so I sometimes feel like that's the one I 'ought' to play but it's very much harder than the original, which I enjoy more (while currently I'm not good enough to deliberately 'hunt' the saucers anyway).

In my area, there was one. A good player could tell straight away.

>>and desire among the females

Now I know you are being hyperbolic.

I have aged a bit since then. I might be mis-remembering parts of those years and, being a Texan I might be prone to embellishment. But I implore the reader to picture if you can, a 7-Eleven with part of it walled off to form a narrow hallway leading to the bathrooms with a line of arcade games along one wall and just enough room in front of them for two players and couple of spectators to stand and almost enough room for another person to pass behind them without disturbing anyone.

Now if you are old enough you can take yourself back to those glorious days of fine Texas gals only a year or two out of high school wearing their Daisy Dukes and halter tops or rock-n-roll concert t-shirts. You're the guy with the hot rod 4x4 truck or the newish muscle car and several speeding tickets.

Of course the guy who got all the gals back then had the Good Times Chevy van with the captains chairs and the bed in back with a bumper sticker that said "No gas, no grass, no ass. No free ride." Or maybe the sticker that came out just before all the Jesus people gained a voice in the Reagan years that pictured a baby boy grabbing something in his crotch with the caption "I found it!" It was intended to mock all those people who were being "saved" by the tv preachers and tent revivalists that used to be common. That's where I grew up. Times sure have changed. A lot for the better. A lot for the not so better too.

@doodlebugging you might want to take a look at this: https://youtu.be/9Oob9CVZF6s

That's great. The belch at the end!! LOL

That took me back a few years. My Dad's cousin had a 7-Eleven franchise when Southland Corp. still owned them. We could drop in any time and get a Slurpee, Big Gulp, a Tony's heat-em-up pizza, or like he mentions in the video - some nachos with all that chili and cheese. Wow.

The one in my home town was remodeled by the owner after it became obvious that people would be standing around the arcade games dropping quarters all day long if you'd let them. He made it convenient. He added a wall inside the store that led all the people who thought they were just stopping for gas and a quick piss right past the row of arcade games. Many of them stopped long enough to spend a quarter or two more than they thought they would when they stopped there.

Not much to do in that town but make the drag - literally drive back and forth all night on the main highway thru town hoping to attract free beer, lonely women, or some dipshit who thought his car was faster than yours. The pool hall was downtown and the highways in were lined with beer joints and bbq shacks. Pretty good combination when resources were pooled.

From the click-clack in the video I'm thinking his girlfriend Mindy shot the video. I wish I had owned a video camera back in the day. All I have are still photos and memories. Thanks for jogging my memory.

https://youtu.be/G5FZRqherbo

That is just like what I remember. Same time frame too, 1979-1983ish. That is what the store looked like just after school got out for the day and for most of the day during the summer. Young kids jockeying for turns at the machines, pointing out their high scores, etc. I was older than these kids by a few years. Thanks for this!

You thinking of Missile Command, hoss?

We used to play in the back room of a barber shop, of all things. Not much in the way of amenities, but he was the only guy who had the foresight to get some games, what can I say?

Yes! That's it. Missile Command. That and the one where you are the tank driver and you keep having to blast those stick-figure tanks into their respective lines - BattleZone I think.

Some businesses were right on top of the trend for arcade games. Good times.

Yep, Battle Zone. It had two joysticks and greenish vectors.

There was another vector 3D game called Red Barron.

I had trouble getting my face up to the viewport for that game, but I loved the look and feel of it. When I later got a Vectrex in about 1982, I thought I had my own Battlezone right in my house. Minestorm was a great little Asteroids clone, too.

It wasn't until many years later (decades) when it occurred to me how nasty that Battlezone viewport was. You had to literally stick your eyes and nose into the think and press your face onto the plastic. Some of us worry about those Dyson hand dryers in bathrooms sometimes. They can't hold a candle next to Battlezone!

I saw a panel a week ago in Portland with a bunch of ex-Atari engineers at the PRGE 2018. One of them, Ed Rotberg now retired, was the creator of Battlezone. Atari actually got recruited by the military to do a similar simulator afterwards. (He hated the project and nearly quit but shipped their product.)

I totally forgot about the scuba-mask viewport... yikes.

>The store had several other machines over the years including Frogger, Space Invaders, Supreme Commander (is that a real one - the nuclear bomber game), Centipede, etc. and periodically the owner would rotate new machines in and old ones out.

My local 7-Eleven had the same ones with the addition of Pole Position and Tempest.

I remember those too now that you mention them. Our 7-Eleven owner rotated games out if they weren't getting much traffic. We regularly had new games show up but one constant was Asteroids. All of us played and every time someone was knocked off the board you could bet that quarters would drop until someone fell and their place in the list was restored.

>> Who wouldn't want to be seen with the high-score holder?

Oh, I wish that was true. My small town had Frogger...

If you didn't have Asteroids I feel your pain. Frogger was okay but I loved Asteroids and Galaga. Lots of quarters found those slots back in the day.

Ah man. Awesome stories. The thing I remember about Asteroids was that it looked like nothing else. The straight lines and glow of the vectors were hypnotic.

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.

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.