How to play Omega Race online
On a real console, the Booster Grip slips over a standard joystick. The stick steers and aims your fighter, the trigger on the grip fires the laser, and both the thumb button on the grip and the normal joystick button give thrust. The emulator on this page does not simulate the Booster Grip, so only the standard joystick controls are available:
- Steer and aim: arrow keys
- Thrust: Space bar (the joystick’s own button)
- Choose one or two players: F11 (Select)
- Start the game: F12 (Reset)
- Save and load: Ctrl + 0–9 saves, Alt + 0–9 loads
Because the fire trigger belongs to the Booster Grip, you may find you cannot shoot in the browser. If so, this version is best treated as a curiosity to look at rather than a game to play properly here.
Gameplay
In the story, the rulers of the Omegan star system have grown bored of winning and invite an Earthling into their training arena. Your fighter bounces off the walls of the arena, and you have three ships to start with. Your laser only fires in the direction your ship points, and only two shots can be on screen at once.
Each wave has seven enemy ships. Droid Ships sit still in the first wave but circle the arena faster and faster later on. Command Ships shoot straight at you, and if one survives long enough it turns into a spinning Death Ship that rebounds off the walls, fires constantly and leaves Photon Mines behind. When you lose a fighter, the next one faces a full wave of seven ships again. Every group of four waves you clear earns a Droid Force bonus. Extra fighters come at 30,000, 80,000 and 150,000 points, with at most four in reserve.
| Target | Points |
|---|---|
| Photon Mine | 500 |
| Droid Ship | 1,000 |
| Command Ship | 1,500 |
| Death Ship | 2,500 |
| Droid Force bonus (four waves) | 5,000 |
Game 1 is for one player and Game 2 for two players taking turns. With the right difficulty switch on B, both players share one controller; on A, the second player uses a controller in the right port.
Tips
- Thrust in short bursts. Drift across the arena and keep your attention on aiming.
- Use the walls. Bouncing off them is the quickest way to change direction and line up a shot.
- Hunt the Command Ships first. They are worth more, and destroyed ships are always replaced, so shooting the valuable ones raises your score faster.
- Clear the mines. Photon Mines stay where they are until you shoot them or the wave ends.
History
The arcade Omega Race was designed by Ron Haliburton and was Midway’s only vector-graphics arcade game. Commodore brought it to the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 in 1982, and CBS Electronics released it for the ColecoVision and then the Atari 2600 in 1983. The 2600 cartridge is one of the few CBS games with 256 bytes of extra memory inside, a feature CBS called “RAM Plus”. The manual notes that a ColecoVision joystick, which has two buttons, can be used instead of the Booster Grip.
Similar games to play next
- Asteroids – rotate, thrust and shoot, with a standard joystick
- Gravitar – another port of a vector arcade game with thrust controls
- Thrust – a homebrew about steering a ship with gravity and momentum
- Space War – early two-player spaceship duels from Atari
- Gorf – another CBS Electronics arcade conversion