Sky Raider

Get into your Cockpit and ride the sky!

Take off and destroy everything that moves (or not) thanks to your Boeing-like stick and your fire button, this is the next mission you have to accomplish.

You have 99 seconds to do as much damage as possible and increase your score to the maximum.

This is the ultimate goal of Sky Raider, a game published by Atari and released on arcade in 1978.

Indeed, the game is clearly scoring oriented. In order to be the champion, you must blow up everything in your path.

To do this, you fly over a river area (which looks like a carpet that you unroll) on which bridges have been built. By the way, you will notice that there are no roads, and sometimes the bridges lead directly against a mountain. The location of the targets, although they appear almost randomly, surprised me quite a bit. It's amazing that the Atari developers of the time, couldn't move the bridges to more credible locations!

I imagine the poor employees going to the oil factory every morning who have to climb the mountain after trekking in the desert, just because the architect miscalculated the exit of the bridge...

I digress. Anyway, each bridge destruction will give you 450 points. It is the same for factories and oil Derrick towers (maybe they are electric poles). But the most valuable and the one on which all your hatred should be concentrated is the airplanes, which earn 800 points. And for good reason, they are the hardest targets to hit because they fly across the screen faster.

With your only stick moving your aim horizontally, it won't be so easy to target and destroy the different objectives with rather approximate shots.

One advantage though, your enemies don't shoot back, so you can't die. It is rather practical in times of war !
This is probably due to the fact that you are flying at a higher altitude, so they don't have time to see you before you shoot at them.

To optimize the gameplay, nothing is really ideal. Joystick or controller? Both, captain.

However, if you opt for a joystick, you don't need an octagonal guide of course. As far as buttons are concerned, fortunately the autofire is present, it will prevent you from spamming the action button and getting tendonitis at the end of your game. It would have been a shame to be deprived of your fighter plane for a few days, wouldn't it?