Asteroid Games

Asteroid Games.
Asteroid games are one of the most generic flash games around using a classic side scrolling or down scrolling system, with the player controlling the one ship alone and then proceeds to fight off and clear either enemies or clear asteroid from the field using a simple rotating control along with a shoot button.
These games all show signs of:

·         Replay values - this keeps the player wanting to play again to either beat a high score or time or even because it's fun to play.

·         Difficulty levels - This is there in a game for when more experienced or dedicated players want more of a challenge. 

·         Scoring systems - These are in games to keep track of your progression and show your ability when you finish the game.

·         Themes/graphic styles - This is crucial for these games as it keeps the game fresh and different between levels and makes the player have something nice to looks at whilst playing.

·         Animations - The animations in a game bring it to life this is what makes the games look a play so much better and also feel more real.

·         Sound effects- This is a game also makes the games more e.g. gun shots. You get to know how it would sound and enjoy the difference in sounds such as crashes.

1.Asteroids

   
This game consists of a spaceship in the middle shaped as a triangle and proceed to shoot at incoming asteroids as you push the up arrow to move forward and the side arrows to turn and the space bar to shoot mini circles representing bullets. You have a number of three lives and as soon as you lose those three lives the game ends showing your score in the top left corner. The main feature i liked about this game was the freedom to move around at will.The replay value of this game is average as it has harder enemies as you progress and there is also a score so you feel like you want to beat your previous score but the one problem is there is now high score system so sometimes you may forget the previous score you achieved and then feel unfulfilled.

The difficulty levels do progress and get harder but do now show a number of levels just a change in size of asteroids and adding of new enemies.The scoring system is as simple as it gets with it held in the top left corner and counting up each time the asteroids are hit. It's hard to find a unique scoring system but usually in flash games in uses the classic count in a corner.The theme of this game is very simple keeping to the black background to represent space and all enemies and player being a white outline with no fill. The graphics are as good as the theme allows them to be with the theme being retro and classic its hard to push to more crisp and more colourful ideas I think they could of at least added stars to the background.The animation is the game is at minimum as well having the asteroids only spin around and a fire that is also a white outline and is a very small animation which I guess uses only two different images switching between each other very fast.

The sound effects have a very retro style of sound with the shooting have its personal sound which sounds very original and when they hit asteroids the sound is a very distorted smash and crash kind of noise that work actually quite well keeping to the theme. 

2. Asteroids revenge 3

    This game is like the opposite of the first game I played and you get to play as the asteroids and try to destroy the ships. It uses quite a few of the keyboard keys which all are explained in a main menu and also starting levels which get you to use certain controls in order to get better and more comfortable with the game. One of the main features in the game that I personally enjoyed was the choice of a new upgrade at the end of each level, which makes you want to keep on progressing in the game to get higher level upgrades.
The replay value is well thought out leaving you with high scores and the idea of wanting to get a better upgraded asteroid, the only thing I could think that could help to improve this, is by adding a save system to make the player want to come back to previous points or maybe a level selector once you've completed that certain level.There isn't any sign of a difficulty selector in the game but you can tell that the levels can much harder to beat and harder to figure which controls you should use for certain enemies. I think if they were to add difficulty levels they have to make a set of maps for each so that might be why this is done instead.The graphics are well developed and goes well with the theme of block colours and with slight shading. they make the game feel more modern and up to date with over flash games. The sound and animation was good, by using a song on loop to keep the players motivated and good explosion and laser sounds for the ships. There isn't much they good do to animating the game but to have the asteroids spin as if they were in space and the ship simply have a bit of fire spitting out the back of them.