"Ah, but for a tiny little thing called collision detection..."

You may not score a single point in your first game of Zaxxon, the first ever diagonal(from the upper right) shooter, as your ship emerges from blackness and likely crashes into the wall with a hole in the very top, but persistence will be rewarded as you learn to fly your ship, judge its height by its shadow, and see how much enemy stuff you can blow up. This includes standard hi-tech gadgets like fuel tanks, radar guns, and rockets to launch. Each wave is divided into three parts, and at the end of the wave you must shoot a smart missile that will launch from a robot if you give it the time(if it does, you can still kill it but don't get as many points!) There are little tricks like rockets that blast off from the ground and can kill you, smart missiles that hone in on you if you stay the same height for too long, and yes, even more walls to navigate through. Near the end of each wave, many of them have force fields at the top, so you can't just move quickly to the very top or very bottom. In this case, you need to keep a close eye on your height gauge and move up or down, shoot, and move again rather frequently. If you can't remember the correct height you can always shoot and see if your missiles go through the wall and force-fields, but of course you sacrifice points that way. After flying around above ground there is a space scene where you must shoot down twenty enemy planes. You aren't allowed to move up and down as in the arcade, but they aren't terribly tricky. They just fly in from the upper right. Killing enough of them leads to a robot with a large smart missile. You need to shoot the missile several times before it hits you--at first, the missile does not move toward you, but when it starts to you can still shoot it. Then you get to start over. The levels get progressively tougher, with less room for flying error after each time you blow up the robot with the smart missile, but the wall heights are the same even if the spaces you get through shrink.

This game had a cool ridged joystick which controlled your ship in the arcade. It fit nicely to your hand's grip when you played the game and was one of the first games to give a real ''star pilot'' feel. With the Atari 8-bit, it's just a plain joystick. In both cases, you need to remember that pulling down on the joystick pushes your ship's height up, and moving left/right will actually move you up left/down right because the game scrolls from the upper right corner. One part that is not realistic but that I appreciate is that you could never really crash on the ground no matter how far down you pull the joystick, which eliminates what would have been an annoying way to lose fighters.

The graphics also seem solid, until you realize that often, collisions you expect to happen don't. This probably won't be an issue until you have a collision when it wasn't expected. This doesn't happen so much with the walls, where you're given several ways to see if you'll crash, but with the missiles the planes fire in space and some items on the ground. The scene at the end of the wave looks the same whether you win or lose, which adds drama, I suppose. Other than that, pretty much everything looks like it is supposed to. ''Enemy apparatus'' like radars, grounded planes, gun turrets, and force fields don't ever really get old, and although the enemy at the end look pretty flat, this is not the weak point. Your ship's shadow on the ground is a nice touch for an indication of your height and horizontal location, and it's neat to see your ship tilt, but on the whole the graphics are iffy.

Zaxxon is a good game to replay if you're looking for classics, as it's been widely ported. The 8-bit port comes off looking pretty good. It's a bit limited, though, as it can become a never-ending story, where the levels just keep coming at you. As in most video games, the plot is a little on the simple side(shoot the bad guys) and once you succumb to video-game fatigue or joystick blister, you may want to look for another game. Even if it doesn't have a cool name with the letters Z and X.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 05/28/01, Updated 05/28/01