Atari Emulator -> Astro Invaders

Oh boy. Another fine opportunity for me to put on my Professor Blogger cap, and pose for you the following hypothetical: have you ever wondered what it would be like if someone went and combined Space Invaders with Asteroids? Well, some brave soul went ahead without the big video game corporations' permissions and did that very thing. Look no further than Mushca Disk 466 for the following title: Astro Invaders... personally, I would've gone with Invader-oids, but whatever. That's why my day job isn't marketing! This Graphics 15 masterpiece isn't available at the slicker Atarimania.com, alas, so we may never know who did the hard work of programming this thing. They didn't skimp on details! The aliens look exactly... and I mean, exactly like the aliens in the official Atari (computer, not 2600) cartridge version of said Space Invaders. A different style from your, say, classical 2600 Space Invaders; the Atari 8-bit ones are more... octopus-ish, if you will.
So we've covered the Space Invader half of the affair. But what about the Asteroids part? Whelp, you've got a ship that spins 360 degrees... it goes all the way around, maybe misses more than a few of all the 360 degrees, and you fire slow pixel-sized bullets... that's another part of the problem. Somehow, the official Atari 8-bit translation of Atari (C) corporation's own Asteroids game leaves more than a little something to be desired. Perhaps this was an in-house job; you know, the guy or gal who worked on the Asteroids translation was feeling a little goofy, had some time on their hands, stripped down the Asteroids code, added just enough Space Invaders code to cobble together this semi-monstrous hybrid. Incidentally, both games feature the occasional managerial spaceship that comes floating by. Here, they cancelled each other out and there's nothing! No extra targets to attach... attack. So what's the verdict? Is it worth trying to flip the score? Probably not. No, I think we have to go back to that old, old quote from the Bhagavadgita... ah, just messing with you. No, I'll go with that old "Da Bears" sketch on Saturday Night Live... us old timers used to not abbreviate the name. It was a "Da Bears" game show, much like Jeopardy! The final question was "Bears vs. Bulls." For those of you who remember the correct answer, you can skip this part. Let's see if I remember it verbatim... damn. I don't. It was something like "Pitting these two forces of nature against each other would be a tragedy; not only for the teams involved... (flips over card) but for our planet. All nations must band together to ensure such a conflagration never takes place." Thankfully, the damage from this failed experiment has heretofore gone relatively contained......................

Mushca Disk 466 - the only home I know of for "Astro Invaders"