I picked this up at a local con the other weekend:
It’s a Tandy/Radio Shack LCD game from 1985! “Penetrate Space City” the blurb says, fighting enemy spaceships and meteorites whilst enjoying ‘quick-action fire’ and ‘battle sound effects’.
Here’s the contents:
As you can see it’s in remarkable good condition as well as being complete in box. You’ll also note it has four-way control. What sort of game is this…?
A quick look at the manual revealed all:
It’s a Scramble clone! And – for an LCD game – a fairly sophisticated one at that.
And yes, it still works perfectly:
The field scrolls to the left continuously and you have full control over your ship. The controls themselves are weird (Nintendo had debuted the d-pad by now so they should have ripped that off) but they are responsive and the game speed isn’t too fast.
Strangely everything is worth 2 points, and the game ends when you score 2000 (or run out of lives of course). I haven’t played it enough to see how long that would take, but my guess is easily more than one full loop.
As a kid I would have loved this game. As an adult I love the purity of it. A real gem of a find at a local con 🙂