Saturday, November 06, 2021

Map Asteroids

Readers of a certain age may remember the Atari video game Asteroids. Asteroids was one of the most successfully computer games of the 1980's, the golden age of the arcade.

The object of Asteroids was to control a spaceship while avoiding and destroying asteroids. If (and inevitably when) an asteroid managed to hit your ship you lost a life. 

Asteroids was of course a classic game which deserves a permanent place in the arcade Hall of Fame. However how much better would Asteroids be if you could shoot maps rather than asteroids? Well now you can find out with OSM Map Asteroids

Stefano Bovio's Map Asteroids is a fun homage to the classic Asteroids game. In this game, however, instead of Asteroids you have to avoid building outlines taken from OpenStreetMap (from Lucca, Toscana). If you want to play Map Asteroids then you might find these keyboard controls useful.

Keyboards controls:

A : rotate left
D: rotate right 
W: move 

spacebar: fire
mouse: rotate view

Map Asteroids has collision detection. If a building hits your spaceship it will flash red.However, you do seem to have an unlimited number of lives. Which is lucky for me as I find in almost impossible to avoid the flying buildings of Lucca.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

(Spacebar lets you fire!)

Keir Clarke said...

Thanks! I could swear I tried pressing 'space' to fire.