The Game: The game begins as the skull-like face of Spyruss the Deathless (the Timelord of Chaos, no less!) taunts you (well, only if you had the Voice), and then a bunch of pesky spaceships pops out of a vortex to shoot at you. They shoot at you rather a lot. Fortunately, you can shoot back with reckless abandon, but their ammunition – as you ascend into the higher levels of the game – can track you and even, if you don’t destroy their shots in mid-air, crawl along the ground briefly while you head for the opposite side of the screen, neatly trapped for their next volley. (North American Philips, 1982)
Memories: One of the last few games to be made for the Odyssey 2, this gem of addictive shooting-gallery fun is obviously heavily derived from the all-time arcade classic Galaga.
A uniquely irritating and thrilling little game, this one. Past about the sixth level you can expect to be toasted anyway, so go kamikaze, do crazy things, and take as many of them out with you as possible!
I got this game when I was about 11 or 12 years old, and I was so thrilled that they had made an Odyssey game about Doctor Who. Only later, when I knew a bit more about Doctor Who, did I realize that this game wasn’t about an attack from that kind of Time Lord…
Phosphor Dot Fossils bonus!
Thanks to Phosphor Dot Fossils reader Scott Bolderson, you can now get a glimpse of the North American Phillips “sell sheet” for Attack Of The Timelord! as distributed to retailers, trying to entice them to order plenty of copies of the game. The ad copy here is a little less hyperbole than the average Odyssey2 back-of-the-box blurb and focus more on game features and sales points than anything. Click on the thumbnails below for a full-sized scan of both sides of the sheet.
