Game of the Day 4/22/2016: Space Cavern (VCS)

[celerystalker]

Space Cavern for the Atari 2600 is a single screen score attack in which you control a space adventurer fighting off alien monsters from all sides in a... er... cavern. You must fend off aliens to protect your ship and crew on foot, and while the game inevitably ends in your death, but that doesn't mean you can't take as many of those freaks with you as possible, forever etching your high score into history. Until you turn the console off.

The goal is to blast the snot out of aliens flying around the screen and ambushing you from the sides to rack up the points. Pressing the button fires directly upward toward the aliens bobbing and weaving above you, which is your primary method of attacking and scoring. Two to four aliens constantly fire down at you depending on your game variation chosen, and new ones repopulate almost immediately. They fire rapidly, challenging you to either predict movement to catch them without taking a hit or deftly dodge when you see a gap to weave in and fire. Upper variations increase the speed and give the aliens more firing angles, which helps keep the game fun and tense, and about half of those variations allow other aliens to rush you from either side on the ground. Pressing up and down on the joystick allows you to fire left and right to fend these ground-bound monstrosities off, and their inclusion adds a lot to the game.

Really, Space Cavern is at its best with the difficulty ramped up, four enemies and crawlers enabled. When the difficulty is low, it's a slow, simple crawl toward a high score, but at higher settings, it's a fun, frantic shooter that's a lot of fun to pass the controller around with friends for bragging rights. It may not be revolutionary, but a good score challenge is always welcome in tournaments and parties. I dig it.

Played it?

[The Clonus Horror]

LOVE this game! I picked it up at random at a little game shop in Superior, WI and it was one of those pleasant surprises.

[Steve W]

Some time in the '90s I picked up a boxed, allegedly "new" copy at an electronic junk store called Electronic Discount Sales that bought a lot of the Telegames backstock after a tornado had damaged their Lancaster, Texas warehouse. Afterwards, looking at the box more closely, it seems like it might have been a reproduction using a scanned original box that wasn't entirely pristine. I've always wondered if Telegames had gotten the legal right to reproduce those old Games By Apollo titles somehow.

I always liked Space Cavern, but I bought it with about 20 other Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Intellivision and Colecovision games at the same time (they were something like $2 or $3 each, boxed and new) so I never really played it for very long. It just seemed like a Demon Attack wannabee. I moved quickly to other games, and since I also picked up a Telegames DINA 2-in-1 for $8 I was finally able to play Colecovision games, I didn't look back too often. I guess I'm going to have to fire up the ol' emulator and plug in my USB translucent, blue LED lit Atari joystick and give it another run.

[tom]

Ah Dan Oliver's (Laser Gates, Rescue Terra 1) first game, still a great shooter.