Starbase Attack

Starbase Attack is an arcade style game base on the popular arcade game Missile Command and written entirely in Extended BASIC. But it's not a clone; it has several gameplay elements of it's own. It has 2 game options - Warhead Attack and Asteroid Attack - which for the most part just changes the size and shape of things raining down on your cities. You have 3 cities at the bottom, protected by shields; initial hits take out the shield first, and then the city once it is unprotected. If you last long enough, your people will flee in the 5 spaceships that area also on the ground by your cities (one at a time). You can only have one missile shot at a time (and it's an instantaneous blast; it doesn't draw the tracking line as the things are raining down on you), and it's completely auto-fire driven. The joystick button deploys a temporary shield over the main central city - but you only have 5 of these. The missiles track to a virtual grid based on the position your analog joystick is at (similar to other Missile Command clones/derivatives on the Coco) so it takes precise positioning to destroy the enemy targets. The game is also one of the earliest to include the option for the Coco 1/2 speedup POKE to speed the game up; at the time, most Coco's could handle it but some could not without hardware modification (but soon afterwards all Coco's from Tandy were guaranteed to work). The only major flaw with the game is it doesn't always hit your target properly.

Title: Starbase Attack

Author: Fred Scerbo

Publisher: Illustrated Memory Banks

Released: October 1981 (first ad in 80 Micro October 1981)