Super Stardust

I first saw Asteroids on a borrowed arcade cabinet sometime in the mid-eighties. Simple mechanics, unforgiving difficulty, and that characteristic laser sound that burned itself into memory long before I even knew what Sound Blaster was. Super Stardust from 1996 by Finnish studio Housemarque didn't deny that heritage — nor did it try to.

It's an action arcade game in the direct lineage of classic Asteroids. The player pilots a ship through space, blasting asteroids into smaller chunks, and dodging waves of enemies that arrive with each new level. The goal is primitive in the best sense of the word: survive, rack up points, move forward. No story, no dialogue boxes, no quest markers.

What Housemarque brought compared to the genre's forefather was a distinctly modernized visual presentation — solid effects by DOS 1996 standards, a colorful palette, and animated backgrounds that turned bare vectors into at least a somewhat lively cosmos. Controls are classic: rotate the ship, thrust, fire. The physics with inertia are preserved, so the ship doesn't respond like a tank but like a frictionless object — if you're not used to it, you'll curse for the first minute. Then it stops being a problem and starts being fun.

The game also offered various weapon types and power-ups, which was a step forward compared to the original. It was this layer that gave Super Stardust its spark, transforming an ordinary keyboard on a desk into a proper arcade cabinet for half an hour. Housemarque proved back then that it had a feel for the genre — and indeed, that same studio released Resogun more than a decade later, which is the spiritual successor to exactly this philosophy. The continuity in approach is obvious at first glance.

What aged less gracefully is repetition. The game does one cycle and then varies it — faster, denser, more aggressive. Standard procedure for 1996, nowadays you'll appreciate it only if you enjoy pure, meditative-stressful score runs. The graphics are obviously no miracle anymore, but they land in the zone of "readable and functional," which matters more for this type of game than flashy effects.

Today Super Stardust appeals to two kinds of players: those who loved arcade gems in the nineties and want to be reminded what clean design without filler looked like, and those who know Housemarque from today and are curious where the studio started. It runs in a browser without installation, without DOSBox on your own, without hunting through old CDs. Five minutes and you're in. Exactly how these games should work.