Archive Internet Arcade: Astro Blaster

List of arcade games from Archive.org

Archive.org has a myriad of adapted arcade games, from the 1970s to 1990s, so that those who do not have access to the existing arcade machines. It was a really hard choice to figure out what game to play. There were so many nice classics that I've played before on the physical machine, but I decided to pick Astro Blaster in the end.

For those who never played Astro Blaster before, a player controls a ship that can move left or right, and is able to shoot enemies. The main objective is to be able to shoot down all the enemies. 

Astro Blaster Game Play

Initially, I was really confused with the adaptation even with reading the instructions under the game. I knew that pressing the 5 key imitated the action of inserting a coin for credits for the game. What I kept grazing over by accident was understanding how to actually start the game. After a minute, I finally was able to start the game realizing that the instructions did mention to press the 1 key to start one player and 2 key to start two player mode. After I actually started playing the game with default keys, it felt very off. I am currently using a Macbook Pro, and I have two Desktop screens for my own convenience. Whenever I tried to move right and shoot one of the enemies, it uses the Macbook's default to switch to the second desktop screen. This gave me a very frustrating experience. What I could have done was probably map the key to shoot from Ctrl to another key, but I felt like that shouldn't be necessary. After removing the the second desktop, my next major frustration was what felt like unresponsiveness from the game. Sometimes I would try to avoid some of the lasers from the enemies, but my ship didn't seem to respond to me clicking the left or right arrow key. As much as I would enjoy this game, I don't think I would like playing it on a computer again compared to playing it on the actual arcade machine.

Playing a video game on an emulator compared to playing a game on the actual hardware feels like a major difference. I personally believe that emulators can only imitate a game so smoothly based on whatever hardware the player has on their computer compared to playing on the actual hardware, which was build for the game. There could be various other disadvantages as well in terms of timely responses from the user's input to the output visibly displayed in the game.