tumaguro plays Star Wars: The Arcade Game

This game was covered in the Angry Video Game Nerd episode for the Star Wars games via the Atari 2600 version, but it was also ported over to Colecovision. As ambitious as the 2600 version is, this one looks even better.

First of all, you've got all four laser cannons instead of just two. That's really nice, because the X-Wing is probably one of the most recognizable ships in the Star Wars universe aside from the Millennium Falcon.

The object of the game is to shoot down fireballs so they don't destroy your X-Wing, and also try to destroy whatever enemy ships you can along the way. At least the game keeps telling you to shoot the fireballs on the top of the screen when you begin the game, so if you've never played this before or missed out on the arcade version, or if you don't have the instruction manual, you'll know what to do. Of course, you can also shoot the TIE Bombers as well as the top of the towers, but you'll be shooting down fireballs more often than not.

When you reach the Death Star, you'll be whizzing past towers while trying not to fly into either the towers or the fireballs that pop up from who-knows-where. You can shoot the tops of the towers to get points, and when you shoot enough tower tops, you can get a huge bonus as the end of the second section.

Finally, you'll be in the Death Star trench, shooting down fireballs until you find a vent hole in the floor of the trench and destroy the Death Star. You then start the game over again, except with a harder difficulty setting than before.

You can only take up to nine hits before your shields finally give and you die, and you can regain shields as you get through a whole gameplay circuit, so it's possible to play this game for hours on end if you're really good at it. You can also choose between any of the first three levels whenever you start the game, which is a plus.

The graphics are better compared to the Atari 2600 version. For instance, it's easier to tell when the fireballs are about to hit you, as they're made up of asterisks. When they're big enough to almost split into three separate asterisks, they're about to hit your X-Wing and take out one of your shields. The Atari 2600 did it the same way, but the fireballs were just a bunch of dots in a circle pattern compared to the Colecovision version. The fact that the asterisks that make up the fireballs spin around make them much more detailed, and make them look similar to how they appear in the arcade version.

The game starts to get pretty hard pretty quickly, and by Wave 3 you're going to be spending more of your time shooting down fireballs than the TIE bombers that fly around and create them just to take as little damage as possible. You'll also be dodging low overheads in the trench sections before you're able to shoot the vent hole in the floor (you'll be able to tell when you're about to get your chance by how the floor transitions to the grid-like lines in the trench floor after you pass by all of the overheads).

Is the game worth it? Of course. The game gets pretty hard pretty quickly, and as it does, the game gets more interesting. It's worth it to see how many points you can get, and if you can get very far...kudos. For the first Star Wars game, this was ambitious, and it shows.