The original incarnation of Asteroids was released in 1979, 3 years before I was born, nearly 30 years ago. Why in the hell it’s still being released?

Nostalgia is a funny thing. I’m sure there are many people who remember Asteroids from their youth, but how many of them will buy this game? Hopefully not many at all, so we can finally close the lid on this tired ’classic’.

If anybody doesn’t know how Asteroids works, please come out of your cave, remove your mask and take your fingers out of your ears. Even a relatively young gamer of ten would have been alive to witness 27 re-releases of this game. Sigh…..You control a space ship and your task is to shoot asteroids. At first said asteroids are large, slow moving and easy to shoot. Once you hit them they break up into two smaller asteroids, and those two become four when you hit the target again. There are also flying saucers to battle against; much like the asteroids when shot once, they break up into smaller debris for you to annihilate. That’s pretty much it - it’s a high score game of survival.

Asteroids Deluxe is the sequel originally released in 1980. It follows the same concept only this time you get an added shield which you have to turn on manually and it is limited. Both Asteroids and Deluxe feature a hyper mode, which whilst looking sharp in the menus, is nothing other than ‘Hard’ as apposed to ‘Easy’ or ‘Normal’.

To really make it look like this is worth your money, each game has an ‘Evolved’ edition tacked on. Bright colourful graphics, big explosions, not a wire frame to be seen……but it’s still the same game! If anything, the cluster of colour when an asteroid explodes actually hinders the game. You often lose track on what precisely you are attempting to shoot when the sparks of colour all look the same.

A life-less split screen mode is also included, but the one thing that could have maybe made Asteroids interesting, an Xbox LIVE mode, is missing.

I’m not against classic re-releases. I’ve had hours of fun playing Tetris over the years, the big difference though? Nothing has come along and bettered Tetris. Developers have tried to alter Tetris’ game modes, but the simple fact is that the original mode which is always included, is the best. Asteroids is a shooter, and I could reel off a list of shooters that are better and more fun. In it’s day Asteroids was new, fresh and probably exciting to play. Nowadays it’s old hat. Even if you’re really wanting to harp back to your youth, you can Google ‘Asteroids’ and come up with hundreds of sites that will let you play this for free.

400mp certainly isn’t the value for money that 10p was - in 1979.