How to play The Earth Dies Screaming online
- Steer your ship and aim left or right: arrow keys
- Fire the laser cannon: Space bar (ammunition is unlimited)
- Start a game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch) or Space
- End a game in progress: F11 (the Select switch)
The difficulty switches are not used.
Gameplay
The alien Trillians have set up attack bases that launch Kamikaze Satellites and Fighters towards Earth. A radar scanner at the top of the screen shows the battle from above: enemies are small white dots and your ship is a white diamond. Use it to steer towards the attackers until they come into view in the large window in the middle of the screen.
Once an enemy is in the window, your cannon’s tracking system takes over the up-and-down aiming and keeps the crosshairs level with the target. You only have to line it up left or right and fire. The window flashes red when you hit something and blue when you are hit.
There are no lives. Instead, you watch two energy levels, your ship’s and Earth’s, shown by coloured blocks at each end of the status bar: green is fine, yellow means your ship is critical and red means Earth is critical, with an alarm as a warning. Enemy fire drains your ship; every satellite or fighter that gets past you drains Earth. The only way to win energy back is to destroy a Trillian Attack Base. To find one, look for a Returning Fighter, marked by a white bar across its back, and keep it in your window for five seconds. Lose all your energy and the game is over. The game gets harder the longer you last.
| Target | Points |
|---|---|
| Kamikaze Satellite | 825 |
| Trillian Fighter | 975 |
| Returning Fighter | 1,250 |
| Trillian Attack Base | 1,500 |
Tips
- Trust the tracking. Dan Thompson’s own advice in the manual: keep your thumb on the fire button and only worry about left and right once an enemy is in the window.
- Chase Returning Fighters. Bases are the only source of new energy, and the radar never shows them. When a fighter with a white bar appears, follow it rather than shooting it straight away.
- Watch the colour blocks. Yellow and red tell you which energy level is in trouble. If Earth is low, stop anything getting past; if your ship is low, dodge first.
History
In the early 1980s 20th Century Fox teamed up with Sirius Software to put out games under its Fox Video Games label, several of them named after films from the studio’s catalogue. The Earth Dies Screaming shares nothing with its film except the title. The program carries a 1982 copyright and the game went on sale around 1983. Sirius also released it for the Atari 8-bit computers and the VIC-20 under the name Final Orbit.
Critics have mostly liked its look and been cooler on the play. Writers have compared it to a first-person Missile Command and called it a visual step up from Atari’s Star Ship, while others found it confusing or slow next to Star Raiders and Starmaster. Its unusual name drew comment too, not always kindly.
