The articlegameplay, story, development, reception
Gameplay
The game starts with the player's spacecraft docked inside the mothership at the top of the screen. Below the mothership is an asteroid field and below that, the surface of the moon. There are three platforms which can be landed on and six stranded astronauts that need rescuing. The player must press the button to release their spacecraft from the mothership and manoeuvre through the asteroid field.
The craft can only move left or right or use up a finite amount of fuel by engaging the thrust (the same button again) to slow its descent. If the craft is landed successfully on one of the available platforms, one of the astronauts will run towards and board the craft.
Legacy
A number of clones co-opted the original title such as versions released by CRL Group and Lyversoft for the ZX Spectrum, and Alligata for the Acorn Electron and BBC Micro. Clones with different titles include Meteor Mission (Acornsoft) for the BBC Micro, Meteor Mission II (Big Five Software) for the TRS-80, and Broderbund's Stellar Shuttle for the Atari 8-bit computers.
Lunar Rescue is included in the compilation Taito Legends 2 for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Microsoft Windows.
