Lunar Rescue (Arcade) 1979

Lunar Rescue is an arcade video game released by Taito in November 1979. It is notable for blending two distinct gameplay styles—precision landing and vertical shooting—acting as a spiritual follow-up to Taito's 1978 massive hit, Space Invaders. The game challenges you to rescue six stranded astronauts across two distinct phases: The Descent Phase: You drop from a mothership at the top of the screen and must navigate a craft through a field of moving asteroids. Your goal is to land on one of three platforms on the moon's surface. During this phase, you use a Thrust button to slow your fall, but fuel is limited. The Ascent Phase: Once an astronaut boards your craft, the asteroids transform into aggressive flying saucers. The Thrust button now becomes a Fire button, allowing you to shoot upward like in Space Invaders. You must avoid enemy bombs and successfully dock with the moving mothership's bay. Rescued characters provide points, with higher points achieved in later levels. Unlike many early 1970s games that used plastic overlays for color, Lunar Rescue utilized "color channels" on the Taito 8080 hardware. This allowed different horizontal bands of the screen to display specific colors, causing your ship to change color as it moved vertically. Source: https://share.google/aimode/wyT2IxovqGLrm5diQ Gameplay: MAME 1080p 60 FPS