Caverns of Mars

Caverns of Mars is a computer game for Atari 8-bit computers, programmed by Greg Christensen and published the Atari Program Exchange ( APX ) in 1981.

Gameplay

Caverns of Mars is a vertically - scrolling shoot ' em up, which inspired in concept and presentation to the arcade game Scramble from the year 1981. Christensen changed the orientation of the caves as opposed to scramble. The player flies here from top to bottom instead of from left to right. Due to the technical details of the Atari platform vertical scroller are easier to program. Using the joystick, the player controls a spaceship that descends on Mars in caves while firing at enemies. There are several different portions of the card. The slight difficulty difficult passages of the cave be removed. The easiest difficulty level has only three sections and the heaviest has six. At the end of each cave is a reactor. In this, the player must land and turn it so. Then the player has to fly back through the cave before the reactor explodes.

Successor

Christensen programmed then the lesser known Phobos, which was also sold through the Atari Program Exchange. Phobos is an enhanced version of Caverns of Mars with improved graphics and additional minor changes. The levels were interrupted by Sublevel with letters as names. When the spaceship is destroyed, the player starts again at the beginning of the sublevels, rather than at the beginning of each level. This system is similar to that of Moon Patrol.

The successor of Phobos was Caverns of Mars II from the year 1982. This version is more similar to the original Scramble including rockets were launched from the ground. These were the main opponents in Scramble. It is not certain whether the game was sold through the Atari Program Exchange, but it was driven by the Antic Software Catalog, the successor of APX.

Atari 1983 published Caverns of Mars on a plug-in module ( RX8021 ) as an official Atari product. 2005 Caverns of Mars was part of the Atari Flashback II console. 2006 an unofficial version entitled Conquest of Mars was released as a plug-in module for the Atari 2600 system.