1st January 1986
This is a well thought out arcade game with all-round screen scrolling. On loading, the frightening 'Deathmask' of the Deathstar appears on the title screen - but nothing else exciting happens.
A high score was easy to achieve at the first level, but then there was a flash of colour, the Deathstar appeared and I disappeared. Here comes the catch - you also have to contend with workers, warriors, crystal mining and manoeuvring your ship to collect the crystals.
To move the ship you can rotate clockwise or anticlockwise - my advice is to point the ship in any direction, fire and pick up crystals. The workers gather stray crystals and the warriors mine them - although I didn't find much evidence of this activity. The warriors can kill you, and when they do it's difficult to discover why.
The screen comprises two areas, the battle screen and the radar screen. The latter seems to serve no useful purpose in the early stages, but as you progress through the zones, increasingly fewer 'Planetoids' are present and so some searching is necessary.
The Planetoids are important because this is where you mine your crystals, and if you keep bashing against the Planetoid and firing you can pick up more of them, otherwise they zoom off into space where a worker will collect them.
When the enemy picks up a crystal the Deathstar begins to take shape; when you do so, you get a Starbomb. Once both sides have 24 crystals, the Deathstar's complete. If you drop your Starbombs and destroy the Deathstar you get 15,000 points.
This is probably one of the better arcade games in terms of graphics, but very poor in the field of sound.
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