Stargate Rocks!

And no I don't mean the movie (awesome!) or the TV series (shudder...).

I've been discovering some cool $1 indie games on xbox live lately, but surprisingly have not yet found a clone or re-release of "Defender" or "Defender 2/Stargate".

That was the last game we got for our Atari when I was a kid (I still kinda think of it as my "newest" Atari game) and remains my favorite to play on the console.

But the years have not been kind to my Atari and the static interference gets worse and worse all the time, to the point where it's just not fun to play games with mostly black screens (like Stargate).

But after another fruitless search for a clone or re-lease of the game somewhere on the xbox live marketplace, I suddenly remembered that it is legal to use emulator roms for games that you own the actual cartridge for!

In less than 30 minutes, I'd found a suitable emulator and the Stargate rom (along with some other roms in my cartridge collection) and was blasting away at aliens to protect the carrots on my red planet. (Or are those supposed to be people?)

In fact, with my USB game controller, I can even map the buttons for the second joystick, which activates inviso, screen bombs and emergency warp, which I could usually only use with a second player helping out. (My toes aren't that flexible.)

Now, where did I put that high score I wrote down in 1988?