In a conceptually simple but occasionally very difficult game, you man three fixed artillery batteries defending the advanced underwater city of Atlantis. Alien spaceships pass overhead, and you have to choose your target - and which of the three guns you're firing - carefully in order to knock them out. Any ships which survive one pass will drop down one level and make another pass. At the lowest level, the ships will begin bombing the city, knocking out habitation domes, power generators, and even your artillery nests. When the final destruction of Atlantis comes at last, one tiny ship escapes into the sky... (Imagic, 1982)

A pretty simple variation on the Missile Command format, Atlantis starts out exceedingly simple, luring you into a false sense of security. After a while, the game is just about unbeatable. Second only to Activision in its wonderfully crafted games, Imagic made its games extremely colorful, with distinctive graphics and sounds that became an Imagic signature.

The question is...did the survivors of the city in Atlantis launch the Cosmic Ark...or did it pay the city a visit to preserve two of its people in the darkest hour? The escape ship seen at the end is the same sprite, and uses the same sound, as the scout ship in Cosmic Ark. Imagic's designers may have been more clever than anyone thought - not only were they making good games, but they connected their games together to form a mini-saga. Read on...

Rating:  Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and addictive game.

Cosmic Ark

As the commander of a spacefaring Ark, your mission is to retrieve two members of every species on every planet you visit, in case the constant ruch of asteroids and meteors renders life on those planets extinct. In the initial screen, the large Ark spacecraft is besieged by meteors appearing from every direction, and your job is to use the ship's weapons the destroy the space rock before they destroy your Ark. After surviving this screen, the Ark descends into low orbit of a planet, and you pilot the scout ship, avoiding planetary defenses to grab two specimens of that planet's dominant life form with your tractor beam. (Sorry, you don't get to make crop circles while you're doing your alien abductions.) If the planetary defenses hit your scout ship, you launch another one, but time is running out - eventually another meteor will plummet from the sky right into the Ark, and you can only defend the Ark if the scout ship has re-docked. When the final destruction of the Cosmic Ark comes at last, the tiny scout ship escapes into deep space... (Imagic, 1982)

Another addictive entry, though a bit simpler than Atlantis, this game was way ahead of its time - an alien abduction game, even one which gives the player control of the aliens, would go over phenomenally with this decade's UFO enthusiasts. Like Atlantis, Cosmic Ark ends with the scout ship escaping intact, but to my knowledge, these games never spawned a third chapter for the little ship's adventures. (But just between you and me, I always thought it would have been neat if you were rescuing the scout ship's crew in Imagic's later - and best ever - game, Moonsweeper.)

Rating:  Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and addictive game.