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Asteroids

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  • Game-Breaker:
    • Hunting saucers in the original, since their artificial intelligence wasn't up to either shooting across the screen boundary or properly leading the player's ship when it was in motion, making it easy to pile up the saucer kills with just 1 or a few asteroids left in the level. The saucers wouldn't shoot for a crucial second or so upon spawning either. All 3 issues were remedied with Deluxe and subsequent sequels.
    • In the arcade edition of Recharged, there is the "7x" Power-Up, which for a limited time turns your regular shot into a septuple-fire Spread Shot, allowing you to turn even the thickest of asteroid groups into dust. It's also great for building Score Multiplier; the game increases your multiplier for consecutive shots that hit targets, and for multi-shot power-ups, as long as any bullet hits an enemy, the multipiler will still increase even if the rest of the shots miss. Its only drawbacks are the short range of your shots and the brief duration of the powerups.
  • Goddamned Bats: The small asteroids, if you let them get out of hand, can create quite the nuisance on the screen.
  • Porting Disaster: Atari attempted to port the game straight from the 8-bit computer version to the Atari 5200, but unfortunately didn't take into account the bad analog joystick controls of the 5200, thus it was prevented from release. A clone game for the 5200 called Meteorites was released instead by a third-party company.
  • Scrappy Weapon: In arcade Recharged, the Laser is perhaps the worst of the powerups. While it does provide a powerful unbroken line that shreds through enemies, it takes a moment to charge up, and it also reduces your turning speed, which can put you in greater danger than just using the basic shot by making it harder to deal with threats to the side of or behind you.
  • That One Level: A few of the challenges from Recharged fall into this trope.
    • "LA Traffic," one of the later challenges, has asteroids of varying sizes going up the screen while other asteroids and UFOs come in from the sides. It can be difficult to avoid the various enemies and the level is rather long, requiring that you destroy 75 medium-sized asteroids(as such, only a small fraction of the asteroids count towards the goal).
    • "Impossible Odds," the aptly named final challenge. You start in the middle of a few concentric circles, and must shoot your way out or use Hyperspace, lest you lose right out of the gate. The former may not always work, and the latter can potentially put you into a dangerous situation or eliminate the powerup-bearing UFO without giving you the powerup. After that, you have to survive for a rather long time.

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