ASTROSTORM
VIDEO COMBAT SYSTEM
ARE YOU SURE?
Your job is to rescue the stranded astronauts. Find every one of them and the wave is cleared, so the scanner is your map, not a decoration. The rocks and saucers are what stand in your way, and saucers will abduct your astronauts if you let them. Every fourth wave sends a boss. Chain your kills for a multiplier, stack power-ups until you lose a ship, and warp when things get ugly. Astrostorm runs on a scrolling world eight screens wide and eight screens tall, with every sound synthesized the way the old TIA chip would have done it, and nothing to install.
Desktop: Arrow keys or WASD to rotate and thrust, Space to fire, Shift to warp, P to pause, M to mute, F for full screen.
Gamepad: Stick or d-pad steers, A or right trigger thrusts, X fires, B warps, Start pauses.
Mobile: Left thumb steers and thrusts, right thumb fires, WARP button jumps.
GAME SELECT cycles Novice, Arcade and Expert.
Astrostorm is a free Asteroids-style space shooter built to look and sound like an Atari 2600 cartridge: chunky raster pixels, a 128-color NTSC palette, sprite flicker, and square-wave sound. Unlike classic Asteroids, clearing rocks is not the goal. Stranded astronauts are scattered across a wrapping world 64 screens in size, and you clear a wave by rescuing every one of them while rocks, saucers and boss waves try to stop you.
On a keyboard, rotate with the left and right arrows or A and D, thrust with up or W, fire with Space, and warp with Shift. A gamepad works too: the stick or d-pad steers, A or the right trigger thrusts, X fires, B warps, and Start pauses. On a phone, your left thumb acts as a joystick for steering and thrust, your right thumb fires, and the WARP button triggers hyperspace. Momentum carries you, so short thrust bursts beat holding the throttle.
Destroyed rocks and saucers drop flickering capsules that float until you collect them. Everything stacks and lasts until you lose a ship. T upgrades your guns from a triple shot to a five-way spread and then adds a rear gun. R stacks rapid fire, shortening the reload each time. S adds three shield charges, up to nine, and each one absorbs a hit that would have killed you. N detonates a nuke that clears the visible screen, and the tiny ship icon grants an extra life.
Destroy things in quick succession to build a chain. Every few kills bumps the multiplier up to five times, shown blinking in the corner. Let the chain timer run out or lose a ship and the multiplier resets. Triple shot in a dense field is the fastest way to a high chain.
The astronauts are the whole objective. Each one shows as a bright marker on your scanner, and flying over one rescues it for 250 points. Rescue every astronaut and the wave is cleared, so the scanner is how you navigate, not decoration. Each wave hides one more astronaut than the last. Saucers try to abduct them, so a captured astronaut is freed if you destroy the saucer carrying it.
Every fourth wave a giant mother rock appears, marked by a loud blip on the scanner. It takes many hits, spits out smaller rocks, and fires at you. Bring it down for a large bonus and a pile of power-ups. Watch for wave modifiers too, like Fast Rocks, Saucer Swarm, Dark Zone, and Magnetic Storm.
SOUND turns the audio on and off, and starts in the off position. POWER puts the console on standby. TV TYPE flips between COLOR and a real luminance-only black-and-white mode, as a 1977 living room would have seen it. GAME SELECT cycles Novice, Arcade and Expert, and returns you to the title screen so you can see what you picked. GAME RESET starts a fresh game. FULL SCREEN drops all the wood-grain chrome for pure gameplay until you exit. Anything that would end a game in progress asks you to confirm first.
Classic Asteroids is about clearing the screen: destroy every rock and the wave ends. Astrostorm keeps that ship and that momentum, but changes the goal. Rocks are the obstacle, not the objective. You clear a wave by rescuing every stranded astronaut, the way Defender did, across a scrolling world sixty-four screens in size instead of one fixed screen. Power-ups stack instead of expiring rather than vanishing after a few seconds, and a boss arrives every fourth wave.
Yes. Your high score, sound setting, and TV TYPE choice are stored in your own browser and nowhere else. Nothing leaves your device, there is no account, and the game costs nothing.