I knew nothing about Star Ship, but it sounded like the sort of thing I might like. The 1977 advertisement for the game actually made it sound pretty awesome: “Hurtle through space in the cockpit of a spaceship, steering your way through 17 games and variations. Line up space vehicles and shoot ‘em out of the sky while avoiding asteroids. Or pilot a lunar lander onto the moon. One wrong move and it’s curtains.” I ask you, how can that be bad? A game of space combat is always going to be more attractive to me than something like Basic Math or Video Olympics, so I was excited when I plugged my official Atari joystick into my 2600-daptor II and opened Stella. This eagerness would no doubt have been more subdued had I known at the time that Star Ship was programmed by Bob Whitehead, the same guy that made the cheating card simulation, Blackjack. It just goes to show how simplistic game mechanics were back in the late seventies, when a guy can be tasked with programming a card game one day and a Star Wars clone the next. Anyway, let’s get on with the show…
Cool cover, although I imagine a solar system with this many bodies would not survive long in this state.
Image Credit: Atari Age
So I’m to play an astronaut riding on top of an alien-piloted spacecraft?
Image Credit: Atari Age
As is standard for Atari 2600 releases, the 17 separate games that the box advertises is stretching the truth. There are really only three unique games, with the other 14 being variations of them. Those three games are Star Ship, Warp Drive and Lunar Lander. I’ll describe each of them and their variations below, but it’s worth noting that I decided not to involve my wife when playing this time around. Unlike some of the other games I’ve posted about recently (Video Olympics, Surround and Combat), more than half of the variations on Star Ship are single player. After Combat sent her brain into a spin for at least an hour, it only seemed fair for me to take this one on by myself. Now that I’ve played the nine single player variants, I can safely say that neither she nor I missed anything by not going head to head for the other eight. I’ve taken some screenshots of the two player variants for completion’s sake, and will briefly describe them below.
The game program included in the manual shows you what you can expect of each variation.
Image Credit: Atari Age
Games 1-4: Star Ship (One Player)
Star Ship involves using the joystick to align your ship’s targeting system (in this case two dashes on the screen) with various enemy spaceships that approach. It’s worth noting that the reticle always remains in the centre of the screen, so changing direction adjusts the position of aliens and asteroids on the screen, not your reticle. Hitting a target results in it flashing for a second or two, followed by your score increasing depending on what type of ship it was. The green Space Fighters give you 1 point, the blue Flying Saucers 2 points, and the pink Space Robots 3. Asteroids often appear too, being a patch of orange blocks that cannot be destroyed, so these must be avoided. Avoiding asteroids, and ships for that matter, is pretty easy, as they’ll only hit you if they arrive in the central part of the screen. Since none of the enemy ships fire back, this makes the game very easy on the slower speeds, but reasonably challenging at high speed. Strangely, Game 1 has two objects approaching at all times at slow speed, whereas Game 2 drops back down to only one object. Games 3 and 4 are identical to the first two, only at higher speed. The hardest thing about the high speed variations is choosing which alien ships to go after, as choosing the wrong ones often results in a collision, deducting a point from your total and making the whole screen flash for a bit. Each game runs for 2 minutes and 16 seconds, so the aim is get the highest score possible in that time.
It’s pretty much impossible to capture accurate screenshots of Star Ship, since certain objects appear in different frames. I’ve picked some that are most representative, but you’re really going to need to watch my video below to get a clear picture.
Games 5-9: Star Ship (Two Players)
The two player variants of Star Ship introduce a blue Space Module that one of the players controls. The idea is for the player controlling the Star Ship to try to shoot the Space Module, while the other player tries to avoid being hit. When the Space Module controlling player presses fire, they temporarily go invisible, making it harder for the other player to hit them. When the standard 2 minutes and 16 seconds are up, the players switch roles. Whichever player can get the highest score whilst controlling the Space Ship wins. The variants are pretty obvious really, running at different speeds and including various other obstacles to shoot / avoid, such as enemy ships and asteroids. Just as with Street Racer, I don’t really need to play the two player variants of Star Ship to know that they would be a bit more entertaining than the single player modes (given the right human opposition), but I still don’t think they’d be particularly enthralling.
The two player variants of Star Ship at least offer a little bit more to do.
Games 10-11: Warp Drive
As the title suggests, Warp Drive is about flying as fast as you can whilst dodging oncoming asteroids. Hitting an asteroid causes you to lose a point, whilst passing one adds a point to your total. Game 10 has single asteroids heading in your direction at a time, whereas Game 11 has two at a time. Flying at high speed whilst dodging asteroids might sound like fun, but it’s pretty boring really. I found that I could go at top speed for long periods just by holding my joystick in any diagonal direction. Even when it did look like I was going to collide with one of the clumps, it was pretty easy to momentarily slow down and avoid contact.
Sadly, this year’s New Year celebrations in Sydney weren’t as extravagant as previous years.
Games 12-14: Lunar Lander (One Player)
The Lunar Lander game shifts the view from a first person inside-the-cockpit perspective to a third person one. All you need to do in the single player variants is move your Lunar Lander over the top of the oddly shaped green object that is apparently a moon and click the fire button to land, while avoiding vertically travelling asteroids (white dots). Each time you land successfully, you get a point. The computer is supposed to be making it difficult by moving the moon around the screen, but it’s crap at it. It just hangs around in pretty much the same spot, making it ridiculously easy. Games 13 and 14 do make things slightly more challenging by adding a few meteors that move vertically up and down the screen, but the only thing I really needed to be conscious of was whether to head straight for the moon or whether going off the screen and reappearing on the other side would be a quicker path. You gain a point for landing on the moon and lose one if you get hit by a meteor, and once again it’s all over after 2 minutes and 16 seconds.
Apparently this system’s moon looks like a partially eaten biscuit.
Games 15-17: Lunar Lander (Two Player)
Unlike Star Ship, I don’t think I’m missing out on anything at all by not playing the two player variants of Lunar Lander. As you might expect, in each of the three variants, one player controls the Lunar Lander whereas the other controls the moon. The three variants are otherwise exactly the same as Games 12-14, with each player having 2 minutes and 16 seconds to land on the moon as many times as they can while dodging meteors.
I wonder if this is the only game in history where the player controls a moon?
I’m afraid that’s all there is to Star Ship. I got a small amount of enjoyment out of the title game, with Games 3 and 4 offering a decent challenge, but in the end this is all very repetitive and boring. I do hope the 2 minutes and 16 seconds game time limitations will cease in 1978, as action games will remain nothing more than short bursts of joystick waggling until that happens. I see no reason to recommend Star Ship to anyone but the most ardent historians. I’ve made a video that should give you a decent idea of how the game plays.
The music is also from 1977, being Cygnus X-1 by progressive rock band Rush’s A Farewell to Kings album. Enjoy!
The Star Ship (1977) RetroCard has now been added to the RetroCard Shop. It’s an uncommon card, so therefore costs 30 smacks and has a limited release of 60.
Featured Image Credit: Atari Age
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