Survivor

Overview

Spaceballs drift in from every edge while bad guys materialize and lock onto your ship, and within seconds the arena is a thicket you carve corridors through faster than it can grow back. SURVIVOR is Scott Schiller's HTML, CSS and JavaScript resurrection of the 1982 Atari 2600 original by Richard Carr — released through Synapse Software — and its 1983 Commodore 64 port by Ewing Soft, rebuilt in the browser from late 2011 as a demonstration of what plain web technology can do and shipped with a level editor. You pilot a small ship that thrusts in eight directions with real momentum, fires paired shots out of both ends along its line of travel, and carries a thin stock of smartbombs for the moments when nothing else will open a gap. The real goal is not merely to last but to gun the turrets off every base on screen; clear them all and the level repeats with everything moving a notch faster, so each loop raises the cost of a mistake. It rewards the same steering-under-inertia reflexes as the single-screen shooters it descends from, and the bundled editor lets you redraw the wave you are fighting through.

How to Play

Move with the four arrow keys — the ship accelerates in whichever direction you hold and keeps drifting after you release, so steering means thrusting back against your own travel. Hold Shift or Ctrl to fire; the gun spits two shots at once, one forward along your facing and one behind you, so retreating while firing still shreds whatever trails you. Tap Space to spend a smartbomb, which kills the bad guys currently chasing you, and you start each life with only three. A run opens with a cluster of bouncing spaceballs and several turret-armed bases: dodge or shoot the balls, pick the turrets apart to detonate their bases, and survive as the game speed climbs. One collision with a spaceball, a bad guy, or incoming gunfire costs a life, and the run ends when the last life is gone.

Tips & Strategy

Treat momentum as the real opponent: because the ship keeps gliding after you stop thrusting, the classic death is barreling into the very spaceball you were trying to shoot, so tap directionally to bleed off speed before lining up a kill instead of holding a key down. Lean on the rear-firing shot — kiting a cluster of bad guys retreats toward open space while the gun shreds the pursuers behind you, which is far safer than turning into them. Hoard smartbombs for moments when bad guys close from several sides at once; spending one on a lone chaser wastes a resource that starts at three and is the only tool that punches through a crowd. Chip at turret bases from the maximum range your shots allow, because their gunfire funnels you into narrow lanes where spaceballs cluster. Once the level-speed multiplier stacks up, prioritise keeping an open escape corridor over greedily chasing every last ball — clearing the bases advances you, and a fast, boxed-in ship dies before it can finish the job.