In this game, you control a laser gun that fires at a constant barrage of falling meteors, trying to destroy as many as possible without being destroyed by them. Along with meteors, there are also spinners which cause you to lose a gun whenever one lands, guided missiles which home in on your position, and UFOs that fire shots at you in the later levels.
The Atari 2600 version is not to be confused with the 2013 kids' show of the same name.
This game provides examples of
- Asteroids Monster: Large meteors will break off into smaller meteors when hit and will drop in diagonal directions.
- Difficulty Levels: Four in the Intellivision version.
- Dynamic Difficulty: One of the earliest examples. The game gets harder as your score increases and easier as it goes down.
- Easter Egg: An Asteroids clone called Meteor! (the original working title of the game) was hidden within the game's code on the Intellivision version. It was meant to be completely unplayable, but a bug with initializing the console meant that sometimes the game would boot up to the Meteor! title screen. Later re-releases by the Blue Sky Rangers enabled the Meteor! code deliberately.
- Endless Game: You play until you run out of guns.
- Every 10,000 Points: You get a new gun every time your peak score passes a 1,000-point mark, but only once per 1,000-point mark.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Not only will even the smallest collision destroy your ship, the Spinner enemies can kill you just by reaching the ground.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: The Atari 2600 game Astroblast replaced the hyperspace feature of the Intellivision game with the option to play the game with either the joystick controller or the paddle controller, with the paddle controller allowing the player to move rapidly along the bottom of the screen to evade falling objects.
- Random Transportation: Hyperspace in the Intellivision version is used as an emergency escape, sometimes dropping you right on top of an oncoming meteor.
- Score Multiplier: Point values for objects on the screen increase by x times its normal value when passing certain score levels.
- Scoring Points: You not only gain points for everything you hit, but you also lose points for every rock that lands or every gun you lose. However, that only affects your peak score, as your end-game score is the total of everything that you hit.
- Shoot 'Em Up
- Video-Game Lives: Five in the Intellivision version and ten in the Atari 2600 version, with an extra one awarded every 1,000 points.
