Sinistar

Sinistar is an arcade game released by Williams in 1982. It is in a class of video games from the 1980's called "twitch games". Other "twitch games" include Tempest, Defender, and Robotron: 2084.

The player pilots a lone fighter ship through a quadrant of the galaxy, initially blasting away at drifting planetoids to "mine" Sinisite Crystals from them, which fills up the fighter's bomb bay with up to 20 Sinibombs.

The plater obtains these Sinibombs by shooting at the drifting planetoids (which look a little like clouds). It typically takes 5 or more shots to destroy one planetoid, which yields between 1 and 10 Sinibombs. At the same time that the player is trying to get Sinibombs, the "worker" ships are also trying to take the Sinibombs. They use these Sinibombs to create Sinistar, the skeleton looking bad guy who is trying to destroy you. At the same that all of this is going on, other ships (called "warrior ships") are trying to shoot you and kill you.

If you are killed before the Sinistar is formed, you are shown how far along the worker ships are in building the Sinistar. It takes 15 Sininbombs before the Sinistar is completely formed. Once it is completely formed, a digitized voice says "Fear me, I live". While he is chasing you, he says further things, such as "Run coward!", which sounds a lot like "Ron Howard", which is what led the developers to dub the game "Opie-star".

There are 4 zones that repeat over and over again. You move from one zone to the next after you have defeated the Sinistar. These zones are Worker Zone, Warrior Zone, Planetoid Zone, and Void Zone. The first 3 zones have more workers, warriors and planetoids respectively. The Void Zone has almost no planetoids and is extremely difficult, on top of the difficulty of the game in general.