Meteor Rescue

Suddenly an asteroid appears on screen and you have seconds to get it out of the game. Meteor Rescue is a simple arcade with ambition — save the planet from cosmic debris, and it's precisely that simplicity that makes it unique. 1996 and your computer beeps when you shoot.

You play Earth's defender. Asteroids of various sizes appear on screen and you must hit them before they land on your head. Hitting a meteor means it breaks into smaller pieces — so you haven't gotten rid of the problem, just complicated it. The longer you hold out, the more things arrive. You know this mechanic — it's the same principle as classic eighties arcade, just in nineties clothing.

Controls are primitively straightforward. Cursor arrows move your shooter across the bottom of the screen, spacebar fires. The delay between shots is pleasantly short, so keeping pace is up to you. Graphics are simple pixel stuff — an asteroid is a few dots, your shooter a triangle, lines as decoration. Physics is so simple you understand it without instructions, so the game surprises you only with how persistently new waves keep coming. Audio? The speaker sound is as one-dimensional as the visual style — beeping, clicking, whistling. Nothing to distract from concentration.

Meteor Rescue stayed in the memory of those who played it in moments when it was just about how long you could last, not about story. It fills you with adrenaline as slowly and surely as an old 386 reads a diskette. There's no complexity you need to master, just a few instincts. Time has partly drowned it out because the genre then unnecessarily complicated itself, but that's exactly why Meteor Rescue remains pure, uncompromising arcade.

You play it in a browser today as a relaxing time killer. It's not great art — it's not Ikaruga or Asteroids with nuance. But that's exactly why you keep coming back. Five minutes with it is still a solid five minutes.