Rocket Raid MSDOS

When you boot up Rocket Raid, it postures like a shooter from the future. Who would've thought something with such ambitious aspirations could run on eight bits — space, aliens, your ship against their onslaught. The usual glory that the name promises. Except…

It's a straightforward arcade shooter where you pilot a ship or some kind of vessel and blast away at whatever's trying to throw itself at you. The screen fills with enemy fire, you're a tiny dot of gold or white in the middle, and your mission is crystal clear: survive the wave and take down as many enemies as you can before they wipe you out. The action unfolds in black space, enemies come in waves and presumably it escalates. No convoluted storylines, no menus — you boot it up and play.

The controls have to be simple — movement and firing, probably keyboard or joystick. But here's the catch: Rocket Raid isn't a game that gives you a grand sense of control. Shooting feels sluggish, enemies spawn in no discernible pattern, and your lives drain like salt in hot water. After a few minutes, you get the sense you're not in command — the game's just ignoring you for now. It's not frustrating in a good way — as in challenging — more just tedious. Like you're playing a mini-game from something larger and someone decided to spin it off as its own thing.

Back in the nineties, that sort of thing was par for the course. Every hobbyist thought they could make an arcade shooter. The result was a pile of games that today read like archive material — interesting more for exploring what games actually got made back then than for being any fun. Rocket Raid is that average whisper in the noise. It's not bad, but it's not distinctive either. Once you switch it off, nothing sticks with you.

If you want to deliberately dig through DOS game archives and you dig that raw, bleak aesthetic of old arcade games, you can fire it up in an emulator. You're chasing the feel of an era, not entertainment. For the modern player though, it's neither nostalgia nor discovery — just a brief, matter-of-fact encounter with a curiosity that only mattered in its own time.