Stargate

You shoot at aliens and collect keys. That's the simplest way to describe Stargate from 1983, a game hardly anyone knows today, even though everyone knows its name — back then it was just a computer spin-off, not a title riding on the sci-fi franchise's fame.

It's a straightforward action game with a top-down perspective. You navigate a maze, shoot whatever moves, and collect resource scraps. The goal is to reach the end of the level and unlock the path forward. Nothing complicated, nothing revolutionary — just the kind of screen-by-screen shooter that showed up on every early-'80s computer with even a bit of graphics.

The controls are primitive, but adequate for the time. You move in four directions, fire with a delay. It won't flow as naturally as Robotron, say, but the mechanics are readable. The problem is, among other things, that the game can be surprisingly tough — enemies often seem smarter-placed than you'd expect, and your health pool isn't exactly generous.

In its era, Stargate had its value — it was what you could squeeze out of a storage disk, and the graphics were acceptable for 1983. Today we look at it mostly through nostalgia. The pacing drags into monotony, the levels feel samey, and there's nothing here that pushes you to keep playing. It's not a bad game, just tedious.

Is it worth playing? Only if you're curious what things looked like in the muscle-building years when computers were just learning to play. Modern emulators make it accessible, but don't expect magic. It mostly shows how far we've come — and how much money people were willing to pay for simple fun when options were thin on the ground.