Spider Fighter

2600 box art.

Spider Fighter, is a single-screen shooter developed by Larry Miller and published by Activision in 1982 for the Atari 2600. It is very similar to the Taito arcade game Stratovox.

My family had this game as part of a large collection of Atari games we got at a garage sale in the mid 1980s.

Status

I own this game. I've never made a serious attempt to top out the score (the game stops counting at 900,000).

Review

• Overall: 2/10
• Best Version: Atari 2600

Good

• For a system that wasn't built to support dozens of sprites moving around the screen at once, the game certainly pulls it off, flicker free.
• Unlike most single-screen shooters where the targets usually follow predictable blocky routes, the enemies in the game have much more fluid movements.
• I like the idea of the Spy Pods "hatching" into stingers if you shoot the Master Nest first. It adds to the strategy of the game to take out the weaker foes first.
• The game has some pretty decent jingles.

Bad

• Because the Master Nests always spawn from the left, it becomes an effective strategy to hug the left side of the screen for the majority of the game, which is kind of dull.

Ugly

• The enemies often stick to the bottom of the screen making avoiding their bombs a matter of luck rather than skill.
• Like most shooters of this era, there is an all-encompassing sameness to the game. You max out the difficulty after about a dozen rounds, and then, to top out the score, it takes about another half hour of repeating the same thing over and over again.

Media

Box Art

• 

  Although it features the usual Activision rainbow motif, the cartoon artwork is pretty bad here. Not a fan.

• 

  An alternate box with a maroon background.

Documentation

• 

  Game manual.

Gallery

• 

  A magazine ad.

• 

  The game patch for scores above 40,000.

Links

• mobygames.com/game/atari-2600/spider-fighter - MobyGames.
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_Fighter - Wikipedia.
• youtube.com/watch?v=oxPCeiz9gqA - Commercial.