Asteroid Challenge Is Bringing Classic Arcade Action To The Wii U eShop

Looks pretty good to me.

Looks solid. But will it play the part? Will wait for your review before jumping in.

Right after Near Earth Objects's release.

Oh cool! The Ouya marketplace is on NL!... What? This is an upcoming eShop game?

Man, now I want a new Star Control. Or an update of the Dreamcast title Armada.

Would love to see the original Atari asteroids but this looks pretty cool. Here's another area where Nintendo falters with the eshop! Why wouldn't they go to Atari (who needs money) and snap up classics like asteroids, centipede, millepede, crystal castles, tempest, missle command, black widow, battlezone, super breakout, warlords, circus Atari, air sea battle, major havoc and many others and get them on Wii u vc?!?
I can now play asteroids, centipede, millipede, missle command on my Xbox one guys cmon!!

Asteroids has to be one of my earliest gaming memories, loved that game, and Centipede. I can vaguely remember my Dad and his brother playing Centipede lol

@Shiryu Yay! this looks like my kinda ideal game! Especially with multiplayer!

I was waiting to see if you can fly to one end of the screen to get to the other side quicker. ie Pacman and the original Asteroids. Looks alright to me. Needs more of that game announcer voice. "Energy Beam!" was the highlight.

I'd love to see more modern versions of old games...

Resembles the rendered look of Blasteroids (2nd Asteroids sequel) and I like the "Space Duel" mode, but is the challenge actually here? Fullblast looked cool, but was far to easy to maintain my interest. I like an arcade game that kicks my ass in 30 seconds if I'm not trying my best.

And if "retro visuals" means putting in scan lines, then I'm not impressed. I was thinking 8-bit raster or vector look - THAT would be cool alternate graphics modes. Still, if the reviews are good I'm down.

Looks like it's probably up my alley. I'm excited to learn more

@Jimmy_G_Buckets I made a conscious decision to prevent the player from screen wrapping. It was actually in an earlier version of the game, but with the space duel style linked ships, it becomes problematic (i.e. on ship wrapped while the other not) and I wanted the experience to be consistent across all play modes. As far as the voice over, there will be more of that in the final version.

@Sean_Aaron Sorry about the retro graphics modes not being what you expected. I mostly wanted to have a pixelated style to look similar to the PS1 Asteroids so the retro looks are not the focus here. And the scope of the game would have to expand considerably to add a vector type mode.

@Sean_Aaron definitely needs vector!

@tomjscott Thanks for the reply Tom. I hope your game sells well.

Looks great. On my "need" list!

Not a bad looking Asteroids game. I'm not too sure about a grey ship shooting grey asteroids against a grey space station backdrop. I think it needs to all stand out more as things can get lost in your peripheral vision(something that did not happen in the original Asteroids.). Other than that, the sound effects are meaty enough and it moves at a nice smooth pace. I'll keep my eye on it.

@Damo lol you guys are getting desperate in your attempts to plagiarize Nintendo Nuggets. People are noticing and your actions will soon come to light.

@NexisGames Get back to work on Cowboy's Tale you!!! heheh

@GrailUK lol... yes sir

@Damo You assumed wrong, Unlike Nintendo Life, GoNintendo was ethical and linked to the original post in their article. What you've done is plagiarism and despite what you might think, I am not the only one who has noticed; so don't be surprised when you get called out.

@tomjscott It's not necessary to apologise, I know the lines are probably lower cost and doing something like changing the models would take time that might not be warranted depending on how much the game is going to sell for - not a bad DLC idea though?

@Sean_Aaron To be honest, that kind of addition is a significant effort. It's almost a complete re-write. Once the game is out, we'll be focusing solely on our next game, Scions of Chaos: Prologue. Sales would have to be pretty significant for us to deviate from that plan.

I feel like it could use MORE retro graphics modes...perhaps one that does away with the 3D background animations and looks more like a vector display over a static card like the arcade game

@GrailUK Point taken about the colors. I've been working to improve the contrast but also to keep the look consistent. This issue is going to be rectified before release. Thanks for the input.

@bofis You're not the first to request a vector mode and I understand why, but it's just too much of an effort for that kind of addition and is well beyond the scope of the game. Removing the 3D space background entirely is certainly an easy thing to do and I might consider it. I'm not sure what you mean by a "static card" though. The original arcade game had no background of any kind. Do you mean the border graphics on the arcade machine itself?

@Sean_Aaron I just wanted to address your concern about difficulty. A couple of things to consider. I've designed the game to be progressively more difficult from the start of a sector to the ending boss and progressively more difficult from beginning to end. You are also able to set the difficulty from Easy to Normal to Hard. However, that being said, the early levels are still not going to kick your butt in 30 seconds. You're going to have to progress further in the game to hit the more difficult challenges. Although, I'm still working on tweaking difficulty levels and the final version of Hard may increase.

@tomjscott In the original vector-screen arcade cabinets, at least the Asteroids Deluxe ones, the screen was actually transparent and there was a static, color, card behind it that you always saw the ship and asteroids projected over, here's the best image I can find showing basically how it looked:
http://pages.suddenlink.net/aae/astdxblur.png

@tomjscott Best of luck god sir, looking forward to see the finished product. And if you need anything audio, me and @cfgk24 are always around.

@bofis Ahh, I don't remember those. I only remember the 1979 cabinets with no background at all. Yeah, it would have to be a future DLC if sales warrant additional content. The reason being that background cards like that would require my artist to draw 7 fullscreen backgrounds which takes time and additional money obviously. But without a vector graphics mode on top of it, it's probably not worth it and vector graphics would require a significant re-write in a lot of the code to accommodate 2D as opposed to 3D graphics as well as vector art for everything. And 2D physics are different from 3D physics so there's that to consider as well.

This game looks really promising. It's probably a day one purchase for me.

@tomjscott Understood...also apparently it was merely a reflection of the vector screen onto something clear so you could see through it:
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2vskw06&s=6
Perhaps as an easier 4th retro mode, the backgrounds could just go away entirely (even without border artwork) to give it a look more like the original, just with nicer 3D ships and asteroids (maybe black and white?) Regardless, this looks awesome and I appreciate that it remains a top-down 2D playfield like the original, will definitely be picking this up!

@bofis I'll give it a try with a no background mode and b&w and see what it looks like. It's an easy test and easy to implement so if it works out OK, I'll include it.

If the playfield doesn't wrap around, then the ship should at least bounce off the screen edge, I reckon. the dead stop just looks a bit odd...

@toxibunny It does actually bounce off. It all depends on the ship's forward movement. If it's moving forward and hits the boundaries then it bounces off. There was one place in the video where the ship turn and almost came to a complete stop before hitting the boundary and thus it appeared to just stop when it hit it. It's done via the natural reactions of the physics collisions and is not embellished so sometimes the bounce is subtle, but trust me when I say that it does and it feels right when playing it.

@Damo No problem. It's nice to hear feedback as it helps us to know what we are doing right or wrong and we can respond and sometimes make changes.

@Damo Just because you are hiding your vile actions behind a much more ethical site does not detract from what your doing. We were sourced in the GN article for our hard work, you just stole it and didn't give us credit.

As I stated, you assumed wrong and you should learn to accurately cite your sources. This also isn't the first time you have stole information from us. It started with chasing dead, after your tweet of death you sent me last yr.

Like I said, I am not the only one who has noticed, you'd be surprised at the people and organizations who have spoke out against your actions.

@Damo There is 100% a backlink in the post in question and I'm sure you get 100's of emails, but this wasn't one of them. After it became obvious that NL only wanted to steal our work, and not follow ethical journalistic practices, we removed your domain from our press release list.

No you haven't targeted anyone at nuggets, but you have written childish articles geared towards pitting our developers against each other. Don't pretend to be innocent here, you guys are 100% bad guys who play innocent in the eyes of the public.

@Damo For the record, I can verify that the original source is Nintendo Nuggets. I provided the information, videos and screenshots to them per a request by one of their editors and I was happy to oblige. It would be sad to see a fight stew over this. Perhaps the article can be adjusted to point to the proper source?

@Damo Thanks. I definitely hate to see 2 really good Nintendo News sites being at odds with other. Unless I get special requests, which may happen, I will try to send news releases directly to multiple news sites simultaneously.

@tomjscott @Damo Thank you very much

@damo nice post, btw.. and in hopes of fixing our soured relationship, we will be sending you guys an exclusive piece of content in the upcoming week or so.

@bofis the background was in Asteroids Deluxe as you've note. It is a sequel that is noticeably different from the original Asteroids which has no background. Deluxe has better graphics and animation, the ship has little wings on it and there's a new enemy type that looks like a flower and when shot breaks up into triangular ships that home in in the player. Much more challenging than Asteroids.

@tomjscott I'm not surprised the graphics schemes I suggested would take a lot of work, so no biggie there. I was commenting more generally that a lot of retro-style games will use scan lines as a "retro" graphical mode and I honestly think it's not worth the effort - especially if your game doesn't really have 8-bit graphics. Your level transitions look amazing so nothing to be ashamed of; I can't see why I'd want to cloud that with a black and white look.

Having different difficulty settings is good, tweaking the curve is key. I guess it depends on your target market. The Raiden games in the PlayStation store are as unforgiving as the arcade, so I don't think the fact it's a home game means it needs to be easier - unless you're going to try asking original NES prices and charge fifty quid for it!

Bouncing off the walls is also cool; I don't know if it's the video framing, but the ship appears to go off screen a bit in parts? Some kind of visible border might be an idea? It's in keeping with some of the levels in Space Duel that didn't wrap - always liked those. I hope it all turns out well!

@Sean_Aaron The reason it looks like the ship goes offscreen in some parts is that the video got cropped incorrectly. You should be seeing more of the game play area. Sorry for that.

This was a nice surpise, I was actually in the mood for some arcade shooting. 1080p and multiplayer sounds nice too! I'd love 5 player support though.

@Shiryu @tomjscott HELL YEAH!

@toxibunny After further checking, the bounce wasn't quite what it should have been. I've enhanced it so there are no longer any odd dead stops. Thanks for pointing that out.

oh! Well I'm glad to have been of some help then