Not my favorite arcade original-- by Universal in 1981-- but this Scramble wannabe got a pretty decent port, which was to be the norm for the king of arcade ports, the mighty Colecovision! Fly your ship in a forced scrolling manner, where pushing right on the joystick moves you forward faster but otherwise you move slowly forward-- this is ideal, since there can be many projectile explosions, and running into an explosion is fatal in this game! Like in Scramble/Super Cobra you can fire lasers and bomb the ground targets (which like to shoot at you or create explosions from their projectiles) but you can only fire one at a time, unlike the aforementioned Konami classics in which you can fire multiple of each at once. Fortunately in this game you can hold both for rapid fire; DO THIS! Watching for those explosions and sneaky UFOs who like to fire at you as you pass them is crucial, and to be able to constantly shoot while paying attention is quite the luxury. At a certain small rise in the ground during the tank area, you will want to stay close to the ground and take out the tanks (there will be about 3 or 4 in a row) easily with your lasers. Their shots will miss you. You can't score a whole lot of points in this game so the rapid fire method will take out a lot of enemies you won't notice since you're watching out for the UFOs and pesky explosions. This was an early release for the CV, so they were just beginning to flex their arcade port muscle. The norm for most CV games was a skill level screen where you get to choose 4 different difficult settings for either one or two (alternating) players for a total of 8 skill settings. Stay safe, everyone, and I hope to see you soon for game #19!
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