"Beware I live!" Sinistar Review!

2600 finally was able to put the finishing touches on this video we shot way back in 2011 of William's Sinistar! When we shot this they had just finished restoring the machine and they had it out in the arcade for a few days before they took it over to Boston for PAX-East were Star Trek: The Next Generation's own Wil Wheaton had a chance to play it. Now if you go and play the Sinistar at FunSpot the attract screen now says, "Wil Wheaton played this game!"

Sinistar is one bad ass game. As I say in the video it's like Asteroids but on steroids. The game plays a lot like Asteroids, you fly around trying to blast space ships and asteroids in order to collect gems to that your ship turns into SiniBombs. The problem is the red drone ships are out doing the same exact thing, but their collecting the gems to revive the Sinistar. On top of that there's other ships that are out to kill you as well, so you've got to race to collect enough bombs before the drones build the Sinistar and you're also being shot at. But the main feature that makes this game so memorable is the Sinistar himself. The voice they use for Sinistar is perfect and you know he's on his way with memorable lines like, "Beware! I live!, Run Coward! I am Sinistar!!" If you see the Sinistar on the screen start slamming down on the bomb button or he'll suck you into his mouth and chomp down on you.

There were also a limited amount of sit down cabinets of Sinistar that were produced around the same time as the normal upright game. I had a chance to play one years ago at Philly Classic (Now Too Many Games Expo) and while it was really cool to be able to play the game in a unique cabinet the Sinistar voice did not work. You really need the voice in the game to know when the Sinistar is complete and to know if you should run over to attack or try to run and collect more gems. Also at the convention they had a homebrew version of Sinistar for the 5200. Back when the game came out there was a planned version for the Atari 2600 and Atari home computers, but do to the early 80's gaming crash they were never produced.