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3-D Asteroids Demo
As the name implies, 3-D Asteriods is a demo created by
John Seghers featuring 3-D Asteroids. According to John,
this demo was created in direct response to GCC's version of
Asteroids for the 7800 (then called 3-D Asteroids) which was
being created around the same time. John decided to throw
this demo together to show that the 5200 too
could do real 3-D looking asteroids. It's unknown if this
demo was intended to be a simple proof of concept or a idea for
a new game.  As this is just a proof of concept demo, there really isn't much to do in this prototype. Clusters of 3-D asteroids drift across the screen, spinning round and round. After a short time they will begin to break apart into smaller and smaller asteroids until the entire screen is full of tiny little asteroids. After a little while longer the asteroids will start to disappear one by one until the screen is empty, then the demo will start again.
There's really not much interaction in this demo. You can rotate your ship left or right using the joystick and thrust around the screen by pushing up. There's no collision detection nor is there any way to shoot so feel free to zip around until the demo crashes (and it will crash eventually). While impressive, this demo has some oddities to it. The asteroids have a weird a pink and green color scheme, which may be a result of the graphics mode used. The asteroids also don't explode when they break apart, the larger asteroid just disappears and the next smaller asteroid appears. The demo is also prone to crashing at random time but being a proof of concept demo this isn't unexpected.
Although this demo never resulted in an updated version of Asteroids being created, it does show that the 5200 was more than capable of pulling off a better version of Asteroids than what was ultimately ported.
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