Meltdown (Europe) is the European release of Atari Corporation’s 1990 light gun shooter for the Atari 7800, one of only five games on the system built for the Atari XG-1 light gun. Playing solo or with a second player, you defend twenty nuclear reactor cores from swarms of enemies called sparkx, shooting them down before they can chew through a core.
How to Play
Choose one or two players and novice or expert difficulty from the title screen, then start shooting. Miss a shot and a temporary barrier appears in its place — sparkx bounce off these barriers instead of reaching the core behind them, up to four barriers at a time, so even a miss can buy you some cover. Power crystals and bonus blocks occasionally appear on screen for extra points, and as a round goes on the playfield gradually shrinks, squeezing the action into a smaller space. This is a light gun game, so in the browser the light gun is emulated with the mouse: move the cursor to aim and click to fire.
Tips
- Missed shots aren’t wasted — the barrier they leave behind can block incoming sparkx, so it’s worth firing early to seed some cover rather than waiting for a clean shot.
- Keep an eye on all twenty cores instead of fixating on one side of the field; sparkx will happily eat away at whichever core you’re ignoring.
- The shrinking playfield picks up the pace late in a round, so prioritize sparkx near cores that are already damaged over fresh ones on the far side.
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