If you read my interview with Mikey Walters last month, you’ll know that he wrote an Atari BASIC game called Space Assault in 1983 that was published in A.N.A.L.O.G. magazine.
Well, Lefty Limbo and I basically begged him to get it up and running again, so he retyped all that code, plugged it into an emulator, and bam!—the Clovis Aliens are back!
I’d say we were all in the process of kicking old school alien ass (last I heard, friend J. was up to 8500 points), but in my case, the aliens are the ones doing the ass-kicking. That’s okay. The ‘Game Over’ music is so cool, I don’t really mind.
If you want to give the game a try (you really should), send me an email and I’ll pass along the game file and instructions.
A profound thanks to Mikey for giving us back a piece of 1983, and for being awesome enough to create the game in the first place.
You can see more Space Assault screenshots on his Flickr.
2 Warps to Neptune 
Dood. I loaded the game onto my emulator and it worked! Except I can’t get the freakin’ arrow keys nor any other control to work! =(!!! All I can say though is Mikey totally rocks. It was worth it just to see the game run and watch myself die. lol
There should be an option to make your joystick the numpad. No?
I peaked at 8500. Until I know it has been broken, I will stand at that. I was impressed with the amount of functionality for how compact the code was. It was incredibly difficult, however. The keyboard instead of an actual controller probably doesn’t help.
I had a blast resurrecting the game! It was so strange to type in something like PEEK(53279) and actually remember that was how to check for the START key. I agree that this game needs a joystick! Thanks for the compliments, everyone!