BOSCONIAN MIDWAY/COIN-OP B+
I never played this game when it was in the arcades, simply because
my arcade never got it. I don't understand WHY though! This game is
BETTER than SINISTAR and even has foreshadowings of GAUNTLET.
It was one of the first videogames to incoporate a lot of SPEECH.
The object, as in most shooting games, is pretty simple. You just
fly a ship around shooting EVERYTHING you see, mines, ships,
asteroids...but mostly the three to twelve big Bosconian stations
from which fleets of ships emerge (Like the spawners in Gauntlet).
So for once you are on Offense rather than Defense. There are
two ways to destroy a station. Each station is made up of six round
"bulbs'. You can destroy these one at a time but it is better to go
for the "eye", the power reactor. Like in star wars this causes the
whole death sta...er, station to go kablooey.
Voices alert you to BATTLE STATIONS or ALERT ALERT and of course
BLAST OFF. There is some garbled referce to a yellow ship I cannot
quite understand 'thief"? "Mothercraft"? anyone know? It starts on
level four. Anyway you get from 2-800 points for destroying this ship
and also for destroying the deeper coloured blue or red fleet ships,
which causes the ships to veer off. I like the scanner and alert status
shown on the right of the screen.
As Goldilocks and the three ghost-monsters said, "ASTEROIDS IS TOO
EASY,SINISTAR IS WAYYYYY TOO HARD....BOSCONIAN IS JUST RIGHT!"
The best version you can get today is probably on the JAKKS/PACIFIC
PAC MAN ARCADE stick. Even though that stick has Xevious and Galaga,
I find myself playing the BOS most of the time. In some ways, if you
take away the voices, this feels like an old APPLE II computer game.
Maybe thats why it just didn't make it.
HIGH SCORE: 895,000 points level 7. You can beat THAT with a stick!