Your mission is to destroy the Castle hidden inside the Mothership. Use your Vertical Trajectory Missiles (VTMs) to blast the outer defenses and expose the Castle for annihilation. Test your skill and try to wipe out the enemy spaceships flying overhead. But be smart! You can only fire one VTM at a time.
If you are successful, you will be promoted to the next level where your enemy becomes more ruthless. Now you must avoid deadly Focused Energy Beams (FEBs) fired from the Mothership, and stars appear in the sky to make targeting of the enemy spaceships more difficult.
As your mission progresses to the next level, your heart will pound as enemy tanks assault you from the ground. Keep your trigger-finger ready and destroy them using your Horizontal Trajectory Missiles (HTMs). But don't stray from your primary objective. Destroy the Castle...before it's too late!
Castle Blast is shoot'em up based on the 5th screen of Atari's 2600 Phoenix where you take on the mothership. Castle Blast is Ronen Habot's first foray into programming the Atari 5200. Ronen used this experience as a means to write a Atari 5200 programming tutorial to assist others who might want to write games for the system.
Castle Blast made its debut at the 2002 Classic Gaming Expo, where it was sold with a box, manual and cart. AtariAge held a Castle Blast Label Contest in April, 2002. The winning label from Zanza adorns the Castle Blast label and manual.
Having been out of print for several years, we're happy to make Castle Blast available again for 5200 fans! This new release of Castle Blast features a glossy, UV-protected label and a newly designed 5" x 7" four-page color manual, both professionally printed.
Author | Ronen Habot |
Number of Players | 1 |
Controller | Joystick |
Cartridge Size | 32K |
Label Design | Zanza |
My hand does tend to cramp up when trying to use the 5200 controller on this one, and I have never liked the "Pac Man" music that Ronen used when the UFO buzzes across the sky (takes me out of the game a bit). Sometimes you hit a block and it has no effect - a bug or a feature? :) Games don't last too long which makes this good for a couple of short rounds of gameplay.
Compared to newer Atari homebrews, this is a more simple game, but its kind of interesting and I always give it a few tries when I hook up my Supersystem.