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8.5 ultra recommended
A very very suspicious asteroid storm has invaded the Sol System, and it's up to two players and one keyboard to save us all from certain doom and destruction. Yes, I'm talking about an Asteroids clone. But this isn't the asteroids you played on your cousin's basement Colecovision setup back in 1982, this is modern day asteroids in the form of George Thornton's Space Chunks. This is a free game that looks better than many commercial independent games.
Starting at Pluto (and Space Chunks confirms that Pluto, as the 2 Skinnee Js say, is a planet) you blast your way through 10 increasingly difficult stages.
If you've been living in the belly of a giant space worm, let me introduce the "Asteroids" game concept to you: Your tiny ship is adrift in an asteroid field. Large asteroids float on and off the screen, which wraps around at the edges. (This means that asteroids which move off the right side reappear on the left side, etc.) Using your thrusters, you avoid collisions, and using your blasters, you shoot at asteroids. When they take enough damage, they split into smaller pieces. Some start out the size of Texas, for example, and when destroyed split into pieces the size of Ohio. The pieces get smaller and smaller, until finally your blaster can destroy them. One might call these pieces chunks, and as you go about destroying asteroids, the screen will be littered with them. They'll take damage when they collide with each other, too, splitting further. So like it or not things are going to get dangerous fast.
To complement your blasters, you also have torpedoes, which deal huge amounts of damage to anything they hit. You only have a limited number of them, however, so don't go holding down the launch torpedo key like a maniac. Your ship also comes equipped with shields, which you'll be happy to have when the screen fills with ping-ponging debris flying every which way. Your shields are amazingly infinite (generated from some sort of super-battery I'm not aware of), so if you want to make it further than stages three or four, you may have to start abusing them in a way that might offend old-school game purists.
Powerups are available! Occasionally, the smallest fraction of what used to be a larger asteroid will reveal itself to be extra points, extra torpedoes, or very very occasionally, a much-needed blaster upgrade. George Thornton writes on his website, "upgrade your blasters to double, triple, quadruple, quintuple or even sextuple firepower!"
I like the sound of that!
Now I know you're saying to yourself, "is there a little UFO that flies across the screen and shoots at the player?" Yes, there is. There are also asteroids with gun turrets mounted on them, and a final stage boss that looks to be fully operational. (I never made it that far, I just looked at the screenshots on George's web page. Space Chunks is hard.)
It's the little touches that make Space Chunks such a fun game. For example, sometimes your ship won't just immediately explode upon collision with an asteroid. Sometimes it will sound a klaxon and spiral out of control, shooting out sparks, before finally exploding. Just like a real space ship would. Probably in these cases an explosive bolt has malfunctioned, trapping a bomb in the bomb bay. It's hard to tell. When the game ends, the words "GAME OVER" appear onscreen in asteroid form, and become part of the storm. That's really cool.
The grungy original music is excellent, and really gets you in the mood to save the solar system from the asteroid menace. Unless you want to listen to the radio in the background, in which case you can turn off the music by pressing "M." However the blaster sound is quite loud, so you won't be able to hear your radio well anyway. The graphics are as smooth as silk, and run at your native resolution. For laptop gamers like myself, that means that the game looks crisp and fresh because the resolution doesn't have to be resampled.
The biggest complaint you'll have with Space Chunks is that the keyboard controls are set in stone. You can't change them. I play constantly as player 2, so I can use the arrow keys to control the ship. I wish I could set the blaster and torpedo keys to something other than left bracket and right bracket. And don't forget, if you hit Esc, the game quits immediately. There doesn't seem to be a way to pause the action to go get a ham sandwich.