Spaceship Blaster

-2006

The Story

The aliens have nearly destroyed our forces. All that we have left is a single tower on a small asteroid. The good thing is that the aliens used up all their ammunition, the bad news is that they are all on a collision course for the tower. You must fight them off with the tower’s lone gun turret. If you fail then our secret asteroid operations are over.

My Thoughts

Spaceship Blaster, the second Xbox Mini game I found in my cereal, has a design that somewhat reminds me of a phaser from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It has a trigger on the bottom that is, conveniently, used to shoot while the dial on the top moves the gun turret. The trigger works fine, but the dial is a huge pain to twist. My fingers are not small enough to comfortably grip the dial and it feels incredibly awkward having to rotate it. The dial can be turned to the left or the right which moves the turret to one of the six positions.

The alien ships move three spaces before crashing into the tower. The game has five levels that get progressively faster. The latter three stages are really tough because you just can’t seem to turn the dial fast enough. Since kids have smaller fingers maybe they have an easier time with the dial. I appreciate the design, but I think a more traditionally styled D-pad may have worked better with this game.

The muddy brownish screen measures nearly 14/16" wide by 10/16" long. I can’t believe they were able to get a screen that big on this thing. There is a nifty little space nebula type of swirl as the backgraound.  

I am going to say that Spaceship Blaster is probably the worst of the Xbox Mini games because not only will it hurt your eyes, but also your wrist from the uncomfortable way you need to operate the game.

Score: 1.5

-Shawn