Back in early 1998 I remember reading a big article about how Activision had secured the rights to Atari's Asteroids. This news came out about 3 weeks after I had laid my hands on the 1998 remake of Battlezone, which is still one of my favorite games, so you can imagine my excitement. This article told of great plans for making a 3D simulation based on the classic 2D shooter of the 80's, complete with engrossing story line and cockpit-based combat. I had recently finished Descent Freespace and had visions of blowing apart asteroids much like one of the early missions in that game. You can imagine my disappointment when I finally got my copy of Asteroids and saw that it was only a facelift of the original 2D version.
Remakes are great.
So with those rants out of the way, let's review the version of the game that did release. The game opens with a visually stunning movie. The missions start off easy enough, but the difficulty curve shoots to the insanity level before you are out of the first Zone, and this is on Normal Difficulty. You can save your progress between each Zone, which also saves your current number of ships and continues. Well you now have more than asteroids to shoot at.