Blasteroids

Blasteroids was one of those games you'd find on a Flash portal in the late 2000s. It fit right in with the simple, quick-play arcade style that was common then. The game didn't try to be more than it was, a straightforward shooter you could pick up for a few minutes between other tasks.

You control a small triangular ship at the center of the screen. Your goal is to clear each wave by shooting all the asteroids that drift into view. The mouse aims your ship and clicks to fire. Larger rocks break apart into smaller, faster pieces when hit, so a single shot can quickly fill the screen with more targets. The pace picks up steadily, and the difficulty comes from managing the increasing chaos of fragments and avoiding collisions. It feels like a focused, reactive scramble to stay ahead of the breaking rocks.