Game Review

Released in 1982 for the IBM PC, Astro-Dodge is a pretty reasonable Asteroids clone. It may not add anything new to the formula, but it's a faithful recreation of the arcade game and as there was no official port this was the only way to play the game (or something similar) at home on your PC at the time. The gameplay elements are all there...plenty of asteroids which split into smaller ones and that ever devious alien. The main drawbacks are a lack of sound and an insane and awkward keyboard setup for controls. Some sounds (even simple PC speaker beeps) and better key choices for playing the game would have made things a lot better and are the reason I gave this such a low rating. Astro-Dodge is also quite notable for it's extremely unusual CGA graphics! Through some clever programming, you'll notice that the game uses an unheard of resolution of 256 x 254 (with 240 lines visible) where 320 x 200 was the CGA standard. The how and why is pretty complex, even if you are familiar with the inner workings of a CGA card, so I suggest reading VileR's writeup in his blog article Astro-Dodge's Dirty Video Tricks for an in-depth examination of how this was all done. You'll find some interesting analysis there, and when you're done reading give this curious piece of PC game history a try!