One of the oldest video games out there is the old “Star Trek” game that people used to play on mainframe computers. Like many other mainframe games, this was ported to home systems in various forms over the years.
One of the most surprising ports of this game came in the form of Stellar Track for the Atari 2600, a surprisingly impressive and full-featured version for a platform not best known for its text-based games. And if you enjoy boring people with retro game trivia at parties as much as I do, you can also tell them that this was one of just three 2600 games that was exclusively sold at Sears through their Tele-Games label.
As you may have noticed already, early-days pre-Neo Geo SNK is a real treasure trove of classic shoot ’em ups. And few come more classic than Vanguard.
First released in 1981, Vanguard was another game of “firsts” for the fledgling SNK. It was not, as some sources claim, SNK’s first colour game — Sasuke vs. Commanderpredates it by a year — but it was their first to incorporate something that would become a mainstay of their later titles, including Bermuda Triangleand World Wars: multi-directional shooting, independent of movement direction.
It also featured some delightful synthesised speech and gratuitously, shamelessly stolen music. And it’s a lot of fun to boot. Let’s take a closer look.
