Asteroids for GEM
This is a fairly faithful replica of Atari’s classic arcade game, Asteroids,
only running in a window on the GEM desktop. As in the original, you have a
ship trapped in an asteroid field. Shoot the asteroids, and they split into
smaller ones, until they are eventually small enough to be destroyed
completely. Your ship rotates in all directions, and the playfield wraps at
the edges. In order to get out of cramped situations, you can activate your
hyperspace function to be transported to a random location on the screen –
hopefully with fewer asteroids. From time to time, a flying saucer will fly
across the screen and shoot at you. Like the arcade original, this version
uses vector graphics to depict the on-screen objects (albeit rendered to a
raster screen). This makes the window resizable. The game can be controlled
using both keyboard and, rather uncommonly, the mouse.