Escape From The Planet of The Robot Monsters (Atari 1989)
4Taking a look back at Atari's classic arcade shooter, Escape From The Planet of The Robot Monsters.
So, the game's theme is thought to be based off of classic science fiction B movies.
The game's story is set upon the fictional man made industrial planet known as Planet X, where a scientific researcher known Dr. Sarah Bellum has been taken hostage by an evil alien race known as the Reptilons. Following the doctor's capture, the Reptilons have captured the research facility's humans, forcing them to manufacture an army of robots with the intent to invade planet Earth and wipeout all of humanity.
The game play is set from an isometric viewing angle, similar to Qbert, with player's traversing a series of maze like stages, where they're tasked with defeating the evil robots while saving as many human hostages as possible. Simply touching the hostages pretty much sets them free and returns them to the mothership. On the other hand, accidentally hitting the hostages can destroy them, though a single hit just seems to daze them a bit, but additional shots will take them out if you aren't careful.
Each stage has an escalator that must be unlocked via a wall mounted switch before players can proceed to the next level. Picking up gems placed throughout each stage increases the firepower of the player's ray gun. Players also have a jump maneuver, and they also can pick up bombs, that when used release an air jump that can annihilate large groups of enemy robots with a single hit.
Stages also have food lockers used to increase health. These food lockers are really important because you have only a limited number of continues before the game ends completely. So, those food lockers are actually detrimental to ones ability to make it further through the game.
Besides the invading aliens and their robot clan, players must also seek to avoid other obstacles throughout the game, including spikes between entrance ways, floor based glyphs that electrocute the player when walking over the highlighted portions, and oil slicks that often appear throughout the game.
Just to note how challenging this game can be, just standing in place for too long causes low floor roaming bots to appear that literally fire in every direction, and unlike alternate characters in the game, there's no way to duck to avoid their incoming fire.
The key to staying alive in this game is to keep jumping and moving as much as possible, or face the wrath of those ground roaming robots. The bombs too are quite useful when you find yourself surrounded from all sides.
The game was designed by Mark Stephen Pierce, and development was led by Bonnie Smithson and David Akers.
The game saw many ports outside of the arcades as well; including on Commodore Amiga and 64, Amstrad, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, and MS-DOS, among others.
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