An excellent arcade-style shooter, Caverns of Mars is a downward-scrolling game where players must pilot their craft through a series of five underground levels filled with alien ships, narrow passageways and a variety of obstacles, including blue diamonds, force field barriers and floating space mines. Fuel must be collected along the way, and at the bottom of the last level a Martian base must be destroyed. Horizontal sections provide variety, scrolling is smooth, and the fast paced, though methodical shooting action is intensely enjoyable, making this a truly addictive game.
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Played as part of Atari 50.
Decent concept, but the fire/sprite limit is annoying to deal with since you fire two bullets at once, along with the player ship's stupidly large hitbox and slow and repetitive restocking periods. I know this is a 1981 game and for the time there wasn't a ton to compare this to, but in retrospect it's very primitive and not interesting or historically important enough to balance that out
Decent concept, but the fire/sprite limit is annoying to deal with since you fire two bullets at once, along with the player ship's stupidly large hitbox and slow and repetitive restocking periods. I know this is a 1981 game and for the time there wasn't a ton to compare this to, but in retrospect it's very primitive and not interesting or historically important enough to balance that out
Lunar Lander but with shooting. Changing the direction of the scrolling doesn't really do much to hide the fact that this is a very basic shooter.
(played as part of ATARI 50)
Pretty successful SCRAMBLE clone for Atari computers, with a couple little twists. Feels good, challenge is about right, and the whole descend the cave/set the bomb/fly back up and escape thing is cool. I think this and RIVER RAID are about as good as you could expect on these systems in a pre-GRADIUS world.
Pretty successful SCRAMBLE clone for Atari computers, with a couple little twists. Feels good, challenge is about right, and the whole descend the cave/set the bomb/fly back up and escape thing is cool. I think this and RIVER RAID are about as good as you could expect on these systems in a pre-GRADIUS world.
Its a fine experience in terms of being a top down shooter where you try to get your ship to get down to the lowest point of the carverns to activate the bombs and then quickly escape said cavern. While you are fighting against the terrain and maintaining your fuel, I just find it repetitive in a non fun way, just feels like a game where it won't really leave an impact like Asteroids, Star Raider, Solaris, Breakout, etc.
Played on Atari 50.
Played on Atari 50.
Surprisingly pretty solid vertical scroller where you descend down caverns and manage fuel and shoot down ships, plant a bomb at the base, and escape. A little repetitive, but looks and plays nice nonetheless.
Pretty cool vertical arcade shooter in which you face down instead of going up. Other than getting fuel to keep going, there isn't much here to really say that sets it apart.