Pilot a spaceship equipped with shields and auto-fire as you blast through level after level of rotating asteroids. Saucers and multi-segmented Killer Satellites take chase, searching for an opportunity to destroy your ship.
It is practically the same as Asteroids, but with a few changes:
- The graphics are light blue instead of white, and the player's ship is redesigned. Also, the asteroids rotate, and the game has a three dimensional background of hurtling asteroids and spacecraft.
- Because of the spinning asteroids, which takes more processing power, there are never quite as many asteroids on the screen as there are in the original game (but the other new elements keep the difficulty high).
- Instead of hyperspace, the player has a shield that is activated by pressing a button. The shield will gradually wear out during use, however.
- There is a new enemy: the killer satellite. When shot once, it will split into three smaller craft that will home in toward the player. When these are shot, they will split up again into two arrow-shaped ships that also home in toward the player. When the arrow-shaped ships are shot, they will be destroyed.
- The saucers have a pattern to their shots. Large saucers fire three shots in a row at asteroids and the fourth at the player. Small saucers fire two shots in a row at the player, and the third at an asteroid. This was designed to prevent the "lurking" strategy used by many experienced players of the original Asteroids.
Asteroids Deluxe has examples of:
- Asteroids Monster: In addition to the trope namer, Deluxe adds killer satellites, slow-drifting hexagonal ships that split into three diamonds that made a beeline for your ship, which each split into two wedges that made an even faster beeline for your ship.
- Colorization: Deluxe had a multi-color gel placed over the screen.
- Deflector Shields: As noted above, Asteroids Deluxe replaced Hyperspace with Shields. The Shields slowly wear out over the course of each stage, so they can't be used indefinitely, and you can't fire while the shields were raised.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Like the previous game, with new additions. You are, however, unable to die from a bad Hyperspace reappearance (due to the aforementioned lack of Hyperspace), so at least you can't destroy yourself anymore.
- Nerf: The saucers aim at the asteroids to prevent the lurking technique (clearing all but one asteroid, and thenwaiting in the corner to ambush the saucers as they appear) from the original game from working. If you try it in Deluxe, the saucer invariably shoots the last asteroid, the new stage starts, and the full screen of asteroids immediately destroys you.
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Nintendo Hard: This is a lot harder than the original game.
- Splash of Color: Achieved in Deluxe by translucent colored overlays.
