Mission Asteroid is Sierra On-Line’s Hi-Res Adventure #0. Mission Asteroid was published after #1: Mystery House, and #2: The Wizard and the Princess, but as it was intended as an easier game aimed at younger players, Sierra retroactively assigned it to number zero. It benefits from improved graphics over it’s predecessors, allowing color fills as well as vectors allowing for much more colorful graphics.
Mission Asteroid was first released for the Apple II and then it was later ported to the Atari 8-bit family and Commodore 64. The box art is extremely well done and the manual which comes with the game is of high quality as well.
The graphics are crude and have not aged well though I expected this before I even began play. The game is relatively short and is aimed at a younger audience. The manual, which comes with the game, even goes so far as to provide an example to young and aspiring adventurers on how to properly create a map of locations.
You play the role of an astronaut who has been assigned to intercept an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and blow the hell out of it. The game begins outside of the NASA training facility and once you make your way inside you’ll need to receive a mission briefing and solve a couple of minor puzzles before you’re ready to blast off.
In a relatively short time you find yourself on the airfield and ready to board your ship.
You needed to file your flight plan before you can blast off and the four colored buttons on the instrument panel represent your thrusters. In order, they allow for the ship to move left, right, up, and then down. Deciphering the flight plan and determining the proper sequence of buttons to push was probably the most difficult part of this short graphic adventure.
Once you land on the asteroid you need to make your way to a small cave and then drop explosives that are on a timer into a pit. You then need to make your way back to the ship and return to Earth. Once you’ve made it safely back you can then watch as the asteroid explodes and you win the game.
Mission Asteroid – Victorious!
Mission Asteroid represents the very first graphic adventure that we’ve played on this journey. It has not aged well compared to previous games that we’ve played but this was to be expected. The segue from text adventures to graphic adventure games was a long transition during the 80’s decade. Whereas gamers have to create the scene or the stage in their mind when playing a text adventure; programmers wanted to move away from that and present something visually stimulating for the player.
The game was enjoyable enough and just the right length to hold my interest. It took me about an hour to complete. I was worried that I would be dealing with poor graphics that had not aged well and would have to hunt for an object depicted in the graphics but that was not the case at all. It was exciting to segue to the very first color filled graphic adventure of that period and experience it for myself.