Developed/Published by: Taito
Released: 11/1979
Completed: 27/03/2026
Completion: Played it as long as I could stand, getting the high score (with a mere 5520)
It’s been some lean times over here at exp. Towers, but FOMO is real and lives beyond the realm of the sensible, meaning that I finally treated myself to a Taito Egret II Mini because–after foolishly not picking one up previously–the system got reissued in Japan after a period where they were only available for eye-watering prices.
That means, of course, that I can start playing all the Taito games I’ve got in chronological order! I’ve previously written about Space Invaders (exclusive to exp. 2601) and there’s not much to be said about playing that on an Egret II Mini, but the system also includes Lunar Rescue, which I hadn’t played before. So after a quick detour to play Head On, I decided to not get hung up on playing any earlier Taito games (Space Chaser is just Head On, Field Goal is a weird Break Out, etc.) even though I could easily get Taito Memories working on now after all that falderal with Sega Ages. I’m sure I’ll end up playing games that I didn’t plan to, but let’s try and put my best foot forward here.
Lunar Rescue seems to be Taito’s most notable post Space Invaders title, and serves also as a notable post Lunar Lander game too. It’s an interesting one in this early wild west of plagiarism because it’s really not very much like Lunar Lander at all, but it does–surely intentionally–include the word “Lunar” in its title. Lunar Lander is–of course–simply a rip-off of Moonlander, which had been kicking about since 1973. So one does have to wonder if Lunar Rescue was merely inspired by the same “inspirations”, considering that Lunar Lander came out–if release dates are even close to correct, of which I admit I have no guarantees they are–mere months before, which does seem like a pretty short turnaround even for a cabinet which uses the same tech as Space Invaders.
There’s possibly even some simultaneous discovery going on here, because Lunar Rescue is basically a two phase game: you’re trying to land and rescue astronauts while avoiding asteroids, and then get them back to your mothership while avoiding space invaders. Yet Asteroids came out in the same month (dates allowing) so there’s really no chance that they were inspired by it!
Unlike Asteroids or Lunar Lander, however, Lunar Rescue isn’t about the physics at all. It’s all digital control in the style of Space Invaders. There’s no slow rotations or fine control over speed here. You move left, you move right, and you can slow your ship with the fire button when landing, or speed it up (and fire lasers) when taking off. The asteroids move from left to right (and vice versa) and so do the invaders.
As someone who genuinely appreciates Space Invaders, I had high hopes for this. Indeed, I can tell there’s some fondness for this game; a near-arcade perfect port was released for ZX Spectrum just a couple of years ago(!) but it’s slow, boring and unfair.
Landing is boring, and hard to mess up even with your limited movement. So the real issue is taking off, where because you’re flying up the screen into invaders who shoot at you, you can easily find yourself shot by bullets you couldn’t react to–and there’s the added quirk that some ascents feature comets which you generally don’t realise until you’ve died to one.
Despite not featuring anything physics-based, the game still manages to lose all of the lustre of Space Invaders; the rhythm, so important to this kind of game, goes from a driving march to a kind of slow waltz, but one where your toes are constantly being tread on. After a couple of goes I really just didn’t want to play it any more, but persevered till I could beat the first level without deaths–inconsistently.
It’s not exactly that Lunar Rescue is bad–it’s competent, but it’s just so unbelievably unexciting. Honestly that makes it one of the very worst things I’ve played in ages, which I know is unfair, but I longed for the snappy if punishing loop of Head On every second with this.
Will I ever play it again? No thank you!
Final Thought: Oh! You might be wondering how I feel about the Taito Egret II Mini. It’s great. Certainly the nicest example of one of these things you can imagine. My main quibble is that it doesn’t have any scanline filters, but that problem was somewhat solved for me by RetroRGB, who recently(-ish) recommended a HDMI to component downscaler that works well enough, so now I can plug my mini systems into an actual CRT. Which is good, because the scanlines on the Astro City Mini are horrific anyway, and I’ve got a game on that system on the backlog…
