Astro Wars
Fancy playing a table top video game?
Sure, how about a game of Astro wars? Nah, let’s play Galaxy II. We could play Super Galaxian I suppose.
This conversation would never have happened back in the 80s because these were difficult names for the same game, released in different regions. Astro Wars in the U.K., Galaxy II in the United States and Super Galaxian in Japan.
When talk turns to those early electronic tabletop games in the U.K at least, Astro Wars seems to be the one that’s most fondly remembered and just hearing those parent-annoying sound effects that come from the destruction of enemy ships, the docking sequence or the game over melody is enough to set some of us off, wistfully dreaming of our misspent youth.
Gameplay
A VFD (Vacuum fluorescent display) game featuring brightly-lit green character sprites on a black screen and powered by an adapter or 4 D cell batteries, Astro Wars allowed you to play through four waves of enemies, some of whom would travel down towards you to attack, similar to the arcade game Galaxian.
Following this would be perhaps the most memorable of all, the bonus redocking stage, where similar to another arcade game, Moon Cresta, you had to time the decent of the top part of you ship just right using rocket boosters until correctly lined up with the bottom half. Play would continue up to 9999 points.
Who knows what happened to my original machine? Perhaps my parents junked it, it was shipped off to a charity shop or given to a younger relative without my knowledge but a few years ago I got a real itch to play it again.
I had a look around for an original machine but couldn’t find one at a reasonable price.
MADrigal
I found a recreation app for IOS and Android which was tempting at £1.99 but then came across a simulator for the Sony PSP called MADrigal PSP which mentioned the ability to play a recreation of Astro Wars.
Developed as an API, or application programming interface for Libretro, a core that can be used with an emulator frontend like Retroarch, MADrigal is also available as a standalone simulator for the PSP and the PS Vita through the PSP emulator, Adrenaline. Other versions have been released for the Xbox, NES, SuperNES, MegaDrive Mini and Nintendo Switch.
Development
It was created by Luca "MADrigal" Antignano who on his website at MADrigal's simulators, mentions that it is a simulator rather than an emulator and explains the difference:
“An emulator reproduces the hardware of a certain system, a simulator attempts to reproduce the software or the behaviour of that specific system.”
He goes on to explain that the reason for choosing simulation over emulation being that each 4bit handheld/tabletop game contains a unique microprocessor of which there is very little information and therefore it’s much easier to simulate these games despite it being a less accurate process than emulation. 8 and 16 bit microprocessors by comparison are well-documented and so emulation is the preferred choice with these systems.
A brief glance at the Wiki showed that if accurate, downloading this application would give me the ability to play Astro Wars along with 58 other Game & Watch, handheld and VFD tabletop games.
As I was already in possession of a cracked PSP, it was a no-brainer to at least give it a try.
On the PSP
Starting up the application from the ‘MAD PSP’ thumbnail, you’re greeted with the title screen and a jaunty background theme. Cycling through the list of games available reveals that the majority are handheld LCD games rather than VFD tabletops.
The selection is not exhaustive by any means because as Luca explains, he can’t create a simulator without playing first playing the game otherwise it won’t be accurate and he only creates simulators for games he’s personally interested in, those being from Nintendo, Mattel, Tomy, Gakken, Bandai, Casio, VTech and Coleco.
Game Testing
There are a number of Donkey Kong handhelds including the classic dual screen Game & Watch version.
Taking a look at this one in particular, we find that pressing start brings up a Super Nintendo controller with the game’s controls neatly labeled. If we press select we can view the whole screen or zoom in the get a clearer view, something necessary on a dual screen such as this.
The classic bleeps and bloops of the sound effects seem accurate and gameplay feels responsive.
I had less luck with the Tomytonic version of Pac-Man wheee sometimes it took two or three button pushes before Pac-Man would eventually move leaving him vunerable to ectoplasmic attack.
The Main Event
Astro Wars was what I downloaded this for however. All the audio effects had been recreated and although there were some glitches, those sounds soon transported me back to the early 80s and could almost taste the Hedgehog flavored crisps and Ribena through a curly straw.
Gameplay was pretty accurate. Much better than Pac-Man, similar to Donkey Kong. I was pleased to see you could still able employ the tactic of staying in the middle of the screen 90% of the game and was even able to dock my ship on the first try.
Overall I’d say if you have an interest in these early handheld/tabletop games and access to a PC or one of the systems MADrigal has been ported to, it’s definitely worth the time it takes to install. If you grew up with LCD/VFD games, you may find one that unlocks a core memory and transports you back to those simpler times.