Mine Storm is a built-in game that comes with every Vectrex unit. It was also released in a 3-D version which required the use of the Vectrex 3D Imager, while Mine Storm 2 is a debugged version of Mine Storm.
One of the built-in versions of Mine Storm had a glitch that caused the game to crash at level 13, so GCE decided to send a copy of Mine Storm 2 to gamers who wrote to the company and complained.
This game is rare because most players didn't know about the offer, and also because few players have reached level 13.
The gameplay is similar to the arcade game Asteroids. The player moves around the screen shooting star mines of various sizes that have different mannerisms. All dots on the screen can potentially turn into mines; after the mine is removed, two dots on the screen will turn into medium sized mines, which when fired will turn into two small mines (note: for the most part; sometimes, perhaps due to a glitch, a medium sized mine will only have one small hatch ). When all dots have been turned into Mines on the screen, the Mineral will appear, leaving the Mines in its path until the player destroys them.
Contact with anything will destroy the player's ship, and the game will end when there are no more reserve ships left. The Escape function acts like a hyperspace that moves the player's ship to a random area on the screen.
Several versions of the original Mine Storm exist; the original will collapse at level 13. The second version allows the player to complete this level, although the game behaves oddly as there is a short cut-scene at the end of each level where the player's ship is sucked out of whatever area of the screen it is in the middle while the stars appear to be projected from it (maybe he hits the warp to go to the next level). If the player stays as close to the center as possible at the end of each level after 13, they will continue to advance; however, in many cases the level skips a few numbers for some reason, and pressing a button on their controller after they've fired the last shaft or piece of space dust can end the game and take the player to the menu screen. This version ends at level 89, as there are a few extra dots on this screen that will never appear in the mines. There is also something that looks like a fireball that won't turn into smaller fireballs when fired. The player is either stuck here permanently if they shoot all the mines and space dust, or they can sacrifice their remaining ships by encountering mines or space dust particles to end their game.
Presumably the third version of Mine Storm is for the later Vectrexes that were released overseas, with a bit of code cleanup. Mine Storm 2 looks the same as this foreign version, as Magnetic Mines appear on Mine Field 2, rather than Fireball Mines (along with other changes in which Mines appear on certain Mine fields) as in previous US versions. Perhaps this version is simpler, due to setting differences with different Minefields (e.g. having only one Fireball shaft in Minefield 9), additional ships awarded at different times (e.g. after completing level 14) and space dust and powers aliens seem to have been omitted (since this was checked at level 51 and only normal mines appeared). There are also many extra levels because the levels are not skippable,