The Game: As commander of the three-stage fighter rocket Moon Cresta, your job is to ward off endless varieties of evasively weaving space attackers. Every time you knock out two consecutive screens of assailants, you’ll have an opportunity to dock your ship to another one of Moon Cresta’s three stages, until all three portions of the ship are combined to create one bad-ass weapons platform. But you can also lose stages very quickly, ending your game – a bigger ship makes a bigger and easier target. (AtariAge.com, 2011)
Memories: Quite simply one of the most superb arcade-to-console ports ever made on an Atari platform, whether cranked out professionally or as a homebrew, Moon Cresta is a knockout on the Atari 7800.
Not only were the enemy movement patterns closely studied by the programmer by watching the arcade game in emulation and taking notes, this Moon Cresta even feels like an arcade game, with the traditional raster arcade font faithfully duplicated in almost-fetishist detail. Selectable skill levels take the sting off of the coin-op’s brutal difficulty.
If more Atari 7800 arcade ports had been made like this, this console really could have been a contender when it was revived in the heyday of the NES.
