Blastrix

Those of us in our sixties and seventies can probably still remember a game called Asteroids, a 1979 Atari title wherein your "spaceship" (a small triangle) did battle against asteroids (chunky polygons) which broke into smaller, faster asteroids (smaller, less-chunky polygons) after being shot.

The original game was powered by 8 KB of code. That's less memory than can be comprehended by the modern human brain.

Asteroids was, and still is, fun. The mechanic is simple: in order to win, you've got to shoot stuff, but when you shoot stuff too quickly, everything goes crazy-go-nuts. And then that darned flying saucer zips past.

Over the years, a number of different renditions of the game have come out, ranging from an incredibly shoddy BBC version that would bore a golf fan to an XBox Live title, of which the following can be said: "Full-screen anti-aliasing and Dolby Digital surround sound complete the gaming experience."

But the best bang for your buck, ever, is the Wrigley's CandyStand incarnation of the game, known as Blastrix.

Blastrix retains the key original elements: the shooting triangle, the delicate, breakable asteroids, the wrap-around screen — but it adds some excellent new aspects. First, you've got a health meter, which means the game doesn't end after three minor fender benders in space. Second, the alien fauna is far more varied than mere asteroids and UFOs; the bad guys have a whole bunch of new tactics that make the game crazier than ever. Third, there's an "autofire" option, which is great, because banging the fire button always seemed like a tedious formality. Fourth, there are power ups, and fifth, those power ups are delivered by orange colored bad-guys that really hurt if you accidentally bump into them. There's nothing quite so shameful as squandering a power-up and electrocuting yourself for four squares worth of damage. There are only a limited number of squares left! Don't waste them!

The original dominant strategy of Asteroids is still relevant to Blastrix — if you can hold the center, you'll probably be OK. The brilliance of the game is how regularly its various enemies force you to move, often at high speed, abandoning that safe sweet spot for far more dangerous and untenable positions along the wrap-around margins of the board. Blue zappers strike with unerring (though lightly-damaging) bolts of electricity, and they tend to scuttle along the sides of the board — if you don't hunt them down, they'll just slowly shock you to death. They're truly aggravating, but not "you're ruining the game for me" aggravating; merely "damn you, worthy opponent!" aggravating. Strikers lob bombs at you while moving across the board, and demand pursuit if they're out of range. And the pulsars erect a grid of laser beams that will entangle you unless you steer clear of it, and/or destroy all their dumb triangular asses.

The game's complicated enough to be entertaining, streamlined enough to be mindless, and elegant enough to be aesthetically pleasing. Every complication to the original Asteroids can be justified; it's a first-notch modernization of a rightfully respected video game classic. And that's something even the elderly can get excited about.