Asteroids is better than Asteroids Deluxe, but only because of one thing.
Let's first take a look at the ways Asteroids Deluxe is better than Asteroids. The first two are purely aesthetic, but give the game a huge leap in terms of coolness:
- The rocks spin. When implementing
Pinneroids, there was no question I was gonna make the rocks spin. Absolutely essential.
- Though the original's "triangle ship" was iconic, the Deluxe ship is still one of the sleekest, coolest looking spaceships in videogames.
The main improvement, though, has to do with the "special ability". Asteroids Deluxe replaces the original's "hyperspace" -- a lame, unpredictable last resort -- with the shield, which is so spectacularly superior that it's hard to describe just how much better it is. It replaces hyperspace's guesswork with strategy, and adds a wonderful new dimension to the game.
Past all this, Deluxe just feels
faster. It's more exciting. It's an adrenaline rush from board 1, and if I only had five minutes to play arcade games, I might tend to choose Deluxe over the original because of this.
But the original is still better, and the reason is: The Hex. Referred to officially as the "Killer Satellite", the Hex itself is not a bad idea -- it's an asteroid with brains. It still breaks up into pieces like a rock, but has the sentience to head straight at you once you start shooting at it. By itself, it's not bad, but it is used quite obviously as a way to shorten playtime. It adds an element of insurmountable, extreme difficulty to the game, which I wish there was some standard term from videogame history that describes such a level of difficulty, but unfortunately nobody has ever coined such a term.
Where Asteroids ramps up the difficulty by continually adding rocks -- to me, the most fun and interesting part of the game -- Deluxe maxes out the rock count relatively quickly, and just starts ramping up the Hex difficulty to kill you off so you have to keep feeding it quarters.
It's arbitrary, it's manipulative, and after the third or fourth board, it sucks the fun out of the game, which then just becomes completely about dealing with the Hex and its ever increasing speed and relentlessness.
Ultimately, Deluxe beats the original in virtually every way, but destroys it all with this one greedy design decision.
Still great, but the purity of the original will reign supreme in perpetuity.
Asteroids is better than Asteroids Deluxe, but only because of one thing.
Let's first take a look at the ways Asteroids Deluxe is better than Asteroids. The first two are purely aesthetic, but give the game a huge leap in terms of coolness:
- The rocks spin. When implementing [url="https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=38161"]Pinneroids[/url], there was no question I was gonna make the rocks spin. Absolutely essential.
- Though the original's "triangle ship" was iconic, the Deluxe ship is still one of the sleekest, coolest looking spaceships in videogames.
The main improvement, though, has to do with the "special ability". Asteroids Deluxe replaces the original's "hyperspace" -- a lame, unpredictable last resort -- with the shield, which is so spectacularly superior that it's hard to describe just how much better it is. It replaces hyperspace's guesswork with strategy, and adds a wonderful new dimension to the game.
Past all this, Deluxe just feels [i]faster[/i]. It's more exciting. It's an adrenaline rush from board 1, and if I only had five minutes to play arcade games, I might tend to choose Deluxe over the original because of this.
But the original is still better, and the reason is: The Hex. Referred to officially as the "Killer Satellite", the Hex itself is not a bad idea -- it's an asteroid with brains. It still breaks up into pieces like a rock, but has the sentience to head straight at you once you start shooting at it. By itself, it's not bad, but it is used quite obviously as a way to shorten playtime. It adds an element of insurmountable, extreme difficulty to the game, which I wish there was some standard term from videogame history that describes such a level of difficulty, but unfortunately nobody has ever coined such a term.
Where Asteroids ramps up the difficulty by continually adding rocks -- to me, the most fun and interesting part of the game -- Deluxe maxes out the rock count relatively quickly, and just starts ramping up the Hex difficulty to kill you off so you have to keep feeding it quarters.
It's arbitrary, it's manipulative, and after the third or fourth board, it sucks the fun out of the game, which then just becomes completely about dealing with the Hex and its ever increasing speed and relentlessness.
Ultimately, Deluxe beats the original in virtually every way, but destroys it all with this one greedy design decision.
Still great, but the purity of the original will reign supreme in perpetuity.