| STARMASTER (ACTIVISION) |
  In the late 70's, early 80's, space and stars were EVERYTHING. Jack Horkenheimer, Star Hustler, Star Wars (the movie, and the Political War strategy), Star Trek was still popular on an insane sscale, NASA getting a lot of coverage, discussions about various things such as the first Space Station. Everything was about Space, and the Atari 2600 was hugely about it. Space invaders, Space War, Lunar Lander, Outer Space (Sears), Space Chase, Space Jockey, Star Wars games x4, Star Raiders, Star Trek, Starmaster....yep, this one, which tries to kind of cash in on the whole outer space warship thing that Star Wars popularized at the time.In Starmaster, you pilot a starfighter spaceship, think something like a space-bourne F-14 Tomcat (it's like Top Gun in outer space) - or like the X/Y/B Wings in Star Wars. Basically, you fly around the galaxy, killing enemies, refuling, and clearing sections of the great unknown, defending the galaxy. That's all I can gather, you don't have a manual - while the 2001 A Space Odyssey music's first 5 notes are the main theme song of this game (Duuuuuuun, Duuuuun, Duuuuuuun.........DUNDUUUUUUUUUUN!) Basically, you use the joystick to steer your ship and fire, and one of the console switches, I think it's the Color/B&W switch, is repurposed for selecting between the celestial map you follow to go into hyperspace, then fly to the location to refuel or blow up other starships that look suspiciously like the Klingon ships from Star Trek. So sort of a Star Trek/Star Wars crossover sort of thing. The map is split up into a grid, and in blocks with dots, you have enemies, in blocks with an orb, you can refuel. In a way, it was a clone of Star Raiders that did not require a special gamepad to work, which puts it at an advantage. The Lonliness of the Long Distance Starfighter - My Experiences I got Starmaster with my first - actually mine - Atari 2600 in 1989. And to be honest, I would spend hours roaming the galaxy without a clue, doing whatever was needed for whatever situation happened to pop-up. This leads me to something possibly interesting about this title I have yet to "test". See, when I first started playing this one, I was not aware of the "galaxy map" or whatever you call it. I was only aware of the whole flying your starship thing. I belived that the enemy encounters and fuel were RANDOM because I could fly around for hours and sometimes just happen to run into a gas station or some enemies, and manage to do something significant. I never expected the "map" thing in a 2600 game until muchh later. I discovered there was a map screen on accident while playing the game on a Playstation on the Activision Classics compilation. I hit one of the shoulder buttons and much to my surprise, there's the blasted Starmap I woudl otherwise not known about to this day. That's where I figured out what to do. I destroyed all the enemy ships and won the game that night, so I finally figured out Starmaster's true reason to be and what you were really doing, saving sectors of outer space from malicious aliens. Awesome. So of course when I got into collectitng for the 2600 in the mid 1990's as a pre-teen, I had to have this, but it took me awhile to get my hands on a copy of it, and that discovery above was a big part in me wanting it after a certain point (so really, late 1990's as a teen), because there was more "game" there than I realized. Even then, it's not ridiculously long, but it's not something short like Stampede so it's a good medium length game with some sophistication, but not so much it becomes a major study-fest to figure out how to play it (versus something liek Code Breaker - which was made worse as Atari mislabled the carts for PADDLE controllers even though it used KEYBOARD controllers - go look it up, it's an actual Label variation error on Atari's part. I had the "incorrect" controller label version as a kid and was so pissed I could never play it). |
