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Listen! Sinistar is talking to you from the ravaged wilds of gaming's distant past, and what it's saying is worth hearing. It's saying that games used to be so mysterious, so malevolent, so tantalisingly unknowable. It's also saying "I am Sinistar!" and "Beware, I live!" and "Aaaargh!" and then it's punching you in the nuts and stealing your wallet.Sinistar is a wonderfully strange coin-op from the early 1980s. Sinistar is also a giant floating skull thing - a kind of outer space weapon of godly destruction that needs to be painstakingly pieced together from crystals that are found deep inside meteors before it becomes fully-operational. All the while, you're racing through the cosmos in search of those same crystals, too, so that you can manufacture Sinibombs - the only things that can bring Sinistar down (although maybe Cinnabons would work, too.) This would all be so easy if there weren't enemies swarming around the whole time, taking pot shots in your general direction and making life awkward.
That's about all there is to Sinistar on the surface: he's being built, you're trying to blow him up, and if you win, the whole thing repeats across a series of slightly different zones. The bare bones of the design don't account for that bizarre, luxuriously nasty atmosphere, however. They hint at what makes Sinistar a good coin-op game, but not necessarily what makes it one that's so very hard to forget.
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