Starmaster
- $6.99
- Regular price
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$8.99 - Sale price
- $6.99
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The cartridge or disc on its own, cleaned and tested — no box or manual. Game condition guide →
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Item Condition
Game only: the cartridge in a protective holder, no box or manual. The photos are of this exact cartridge — look them over closely for its condition, packaging and details. Every cartridge's shell, label and board are checked for authenticity when it comes into the store, and it's tested before it's listed. It ships in a collector's bag or a hard plastic case.
Item Description
Alan Miller set out to squeeze the feeling of Star Raiders, the sprawling space epic on Atari's 8-bit computers, onto the far more limited Atari 2600, and Starmaster is how close he came. The view is from your cockpit, stars streaming toward you as you hunt enemy fighters across the galaxy, and the whole thing runs on a standard joystick and the console's switches.
The heart of the game is the galactic chart, a six-by-six grid showing your position, your four starbases and the enemy squadrons closing in on them. Every decision costs energy. Warping to a sector drains it, and you have to dodge or shoot meteors on the way. Each laser shot costs 100 units, and each hit you take costs 100 to 500 more. Enemy fire can knock out your shields, lasers or radar, and losing radar doubles your warp costs and hides the enemy on the map. Docking with a starbase, a fiddly maneuver in its own right, restores energy and repairs damage, but the enemy is trying to surround those bases, and a captured base vanishes from the chart for good.
Four difficulty levels run from Ensign, with nine enemy fighters at normal speed, up to StarMaster, with 31 enemies moving two and a half times as fast. When the mission ends, the game rates your performance on enemies destroyed, bases saved and time taken, which gives every run a scoreboard to beat.
Miller had already programmed Surround at Atari before co-founding Activision, and Starmaster became his most commercially successful game by 1983. It earned a Certificate of Merit at the 1983 Arcade Awards, and retrospective reviewers have called it the best space combat simulation on the 2600, ahead of the console's own port of Star Raiders. It is the cartridge to reach for when you want a 2600 game that rewards planning as much as reflexes.
Fast factsgame data via IGDB
- Released
- 1982
- Publisher
- Activision
- Players
- Single player
About the game
In the game the player pilots a starfighter, with the purpose of destroying a number of enemy ships before they destroy four friendly starbases. Gameplay is presented mostly in first person cockpit view, which is achieved with surprisingly good effect given the 2600's primitive graphics capabilities. The starfighter carries laser weapons, shields, and a faster-than-light drive. The fighter also carries a limited energy supply, which is drained by firing the lasers, being hit by enemy fire, warping, or simply flying around. If the ship's energy drops to zero it is destroyed, and the game ends. Enemy fire can knock out the fighter's subsystems (such as weapons) on top of draining energy. The game "universe" is a square-shaped galaxy mapped into a grid of 36 sectors. Each sector can be home to some enemy ships, a starbase, both, or nothing. The player "warps" the fighter to a sector to engage enemy ships; once they are all destroyed, the player moves on to another. The player can also warp to a sector with a starbase, and dock with it (a rather tricky process) to replenish energy and repair damaged subsystems.
Summary from the IGDB community database — the condition and contents of this listing are described above and in the photos.Watch gameplayStarmaster on Atari 2600
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Atari 2600
Starmaster
$6.99
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Atari 2600
Starmaster
$6.99
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