Lunar Lander - review

The Game Room series is a great way to savour nostalgic gaming experiences every bit well equally try archetype video games for the first fourth dimension. I happily did both things while preparing for my Centipede and Pitfall! reviews. Unfortunately though, not every game stands the exam of time. Some games are pretty tough to go into if you didn't play them when they were showtime released. Lunar Lander is similar that. Sure, it's historically important, but I doubt many Windows Phone gamers volition really intendance to play information technology.

Lunar Lander blasted off into arcades in 1979, the year of my nascence. Its arcade competition that yr consisted primarily of Space Invaders (1978) and Galaxian. While those two games feature science fiction themes and aliens to nail, Lunar Lander is grounded in reality. The histrion pilots a lunar landing module as it descends to Globe's moon. Death comes not from unfriendly visitors but from crashing into the mural or even just landing too quickly – again, a more realistic setup than the contest. This is even so a video game though, then players do get more chances to play until they run out of fuel.

Rocket past the interruption for our fuel review.

Piloting the send

Lunar Lander'due south controls simplify the task of piloting a spacecraft while nevertheless feeling accurate. Two buttons rotate the craft left or right up to 90 degrees – it'south impossible to plow upside-down for some reason. The Abort button enrages Bible thumpers, I mean instantly blasts the lander straight upwards and away from the ground at the expense of 100 fuel units. In the arcades, thrust was controlled by an actual lever. The farther up the lever is pushed, the more the craft's rocket blasts and the more fuel information technology burns. The Windows Phone version does a good task approximating the lever with a slider on the right side of the screen. Conspicuously it lacks the tactile sensation that a concrete lever would provide, but the arcade experience essentially survives intact.

Landing for loonies

Players have a lot to monitor if they want to succeed in Lunar Lander. First, they must choice a landing spot. The terrain never changes but bonus spots exercise. These points take a blinking number beneath them that shows how the score will be multiplied if the send crashes or lands there. After successful landings, the bonus spots commonly reset to different points. They are essential to scoring well, so you'll most always want to get for them.

To get those points, y'all'll have to master the art of landing. It's not easy, due in role to Lunar Lander'south camera organisation. The game switches to a zoomed-in view every bit the lander nears the terrain. Information technology's a good idea poorly executed. The photographic camera oft zoomed in on the peak portion of the central mountain even as I tried to land on the everyman bespeak of the mountain, which remained off-screen until the terminal second. It would make more than sense to eye the photographic camera on the player's ship instead of trying to zoom in on an incorrectly-guessed landing target.

Regardless of photographic camera problems, the actual game play is fairly challenging. It probably took me 20 or thirty tries earlier I successfully landed the arts and crafts. The ship must be horizontally lined upwards with the potential landing spot, for starters. The bonus spots are unremarkably quite pocket-size and aiming more than one or 2 pixels off results in a crash.

Gaining control over inertia is of import too. As you near the landing area, you lot'll want to fire off the thruster in short bursts until your downward speed reaches zero. And so it's a matter of keeping the arts and crafts simply above the ground until yous're comfortable letting information technology slowly drop. If the transport'southward speed is greater than 10, the landing volition neglect, so you have to fire small thruster bursts until pretty much the last moment if you hope to land. Patience and skill are required to succeed.

Stark visuals

Fifty-fifty if new players aren't put off by Lunar Lander's steep learning curve, they'll too have to wait by the antiquated graphics. Lunar Lander was Atari'due south offset vector graphics game. "Vector graphics is the utilise of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based on mathematical equations, to represent images," according to Wikipedia. This immune the transport in Lunar Lander to rotate much more smoothly than traditional raster graphics, which would have required the use of a separate sprite for every possible frame of animation. The game is likewise able to zoom in when the ship gets close to terrain thanks to the magic of vectors. Unfortunately, a special black-and-white monitor was required to produce those graphics – color vector graphics didn't come forth until Atari's Tempest in 1982.

Many older arcade games still look charming to modern optics – Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Centipede, to name a few. But Lunar Lander doesn't hold upward too because of the absence of color and the farthermost simplicity of its graphics. Fifty-fifty in 1979, there were prettier games, such as Namco'south Galaxian (the predecessor to Galaga). It's not that a colorless, completely-plain-looking game can't be fun nowadays. Lunar Lander just doesn't have any hint of the visual charms that nigh games utilize to draw players in. Plus the role player's transport is incredibly tiny – almost ii mm on my Samsung Focus. I'd hate to play this game on a device like the LG Quantum with its smaller screen.

Medals

Equally with other Game Room titles, Lunar Lander awards medals in three categories after each game: Score, Survival, and Playtime. Each comes in bronze, silvery, and gold varieties. Information technology takes 750 points to take hold of the gold Score medal. A perfect landing on a 5X bonus spot awards 250 points, so practicing until you tin do that thrice is central. The gold Survival medal should come along with a successful Score attempt, and the Playtime medal is merely as easy as in other Game Room games.

Achievements

Flyer image courtesy of The Arcade Flyer Archive.

A total of three Achievements come up from earning medals during gameplay. The standard Game Room 3 secret Achievements (trounce your high score, watch the credits, and play with crappy tilt controls) and three location-based Achievements are also present. Lunar Lander'south sole unique Achievement comes from playing during a full moon. The game checks your telephone'southward date setting, so it's possible to fix the date back to a past full moon (like Apr 18, 2022) and instantly unlock the Achievement. Merely make sure you don't gear up it to a futurity engagement as that will cause bug with Xbox Live.

Overall Impression

I tin can't imagine that the crossover between surviving Lunar Lander fans and Windows Phone users is all that large. With and so many other possible Game Room titles that Microsoft could have chosen to port, it's a mystery why this version of Lunar Lander even exists. But it's here and it's a relatively easy 200 GamerScore for Achievement hunters, plus it will help Xbox 360 and PC gamers make progress towards those platforms' Game Room Achievements. Why do you think I'thousand reviewing this anyway? Permit'due south but hope Microsoft manages the Windows Phone Xbox Alive portfolio more wisely in the future.

Lunar Lander costs a mighty $2.99 and has a free trial. Land here (Zune link) to take hold of it on the Marketplace.

Updated February 2022

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Source: https://www.windowscentral.com/lunar-lander-review

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