Meteor Rescue

Meteor Rescue is a video game in the action genre developed by PLBM Games and published by PLBM Games originally released in 1996. It is currently playable on DOS.

Meteor Rescue is a single-player, keyboard-controlled game that is very similar to Meteor Mission and may well be a later version of that game.

Once again, some poor astronauts have been marooned on a desolate planetoid. Your job is to pick them up and bring them home.
This is a game of two halves. In the first half, the player's ship is held in a sort of cage in the dropship that moves left/right across the top of the screen. As soon as the main engines start up, the floor of the cage retracts and the ship begins its descent. Timing is important, as the space between the ship and the landing pads contains orbiting rocks to avoid.
Once the spacecraft has landed, the astronaut climbs aboard and the spacecraft begins its ascent. The ascent rate can be increased, but not decreased, so there is no hiding at the bottom of the screen until the orbiting rocks are out of the way. Fortunately, the ship has a cannon that only works during the ascent phase, which can be used to shoot the rocks for extra points and reach the descending ship. All the player has to do now is avoid the rocks and dock with the descent ship by re-entering the cage. As an added complication, the dropship keeps moving from side to side and stops at a random location each time.

The player has five lives with which to accumulate the highest score possible. Once all the astronauts are rescued, there is a brief fanfare and the game begins the next level with a new set of astronauts and more obstacles.

Landing too fast, colliding with a flying rock, colliding with the drop ship, driving past the drop ship, trying to maneuver inside the drop ship all destroy the player's ship and cost a life.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.