NEXT - Battlezone (1980)

 Sometimes, in the process of reviewing a game, I'll decide it's missing some qualities that make it worthy of a full review. We call these posts NEXT - short for "Not EXactly Thought-provoking"

The facts

• Game title: Battlezone
• Master List entry: FPS #7, in the 1980 timeline 
• Platforms: Arcade (1980), Atari 2600 (1983), Commodore 64, Commodore VIC-20 (1984), Atari ST (1987) 
• Available for purchase: nowhere, it's an arcade cabinet. 
• How long to beat: 15 minutes (I'm not sure what "beating" this would even mean though...) 
• Why are you not reviewing this: too shallow to earn a rating

Battlezone is an arcade game, developed by Atari, hitting the arcades in 1980. As many early arcade games, it is a simple concept: you're controlling a tank from a first-person perspective, and get to move it in the four cardinal directions, and shoot. The twist on the formula is how you control the tank: the cabinets had two levers, meant to represent the two tracks of the tank. Push both levers up or down, the tank moves forward/backwards. But push one and pull the other, and the tank will rotate in the direction of the level you pulled down.

Picture from The Arcade Blogger, with a lovely story about these cabinets

The attract screen is not much to look at, though I consider that to be typical of all cabinets of the day. You see the game background, and the title slowly moves up the screen, like a Star Wars title crawl.

You put in your hard-earned quarter, and you stumble up a deserted landscape, full of mountains in the distance (and one volcano) while the moon is up in the air.

You have no time to admire your surroundings, as there is another tank being spawned in this landscape, which you hopefully can track using the radar at the top of the screen. The top piece of the pie represents your screen view, and the dot somewhere in the pie is the enemy. Turn around, get it in your sights, and shoot; that is, if the tank spawned far enough from you and turned in a different direction so they can't one-shot you right after you spawn.

 

 

Your goal now is just to stay alive and shoot as many enemies as possible. These come in three varieties: the tanks we've already seen are the main type of enemy you'll encounter. They beeline straight to you (with some pathfinding difficulties, thankfully), aim, and rarely miss; your best chance to avoid them is to keep moving in a transversal direction, as there is no way for your tank to strafe, so the moment another tank has you in its sights, you WILL lose a life. Every few tanks, a saucer spawns, worth (I believe) three times as many points; if you manage to stay alive long enough, a third type of enemy will show up, whose only purpose is to crash into you. I do not know if there are even more enemies, as I have not survived long enough, but it seems unlikely.

 

That's all there is to the game: keep killing things and surviving for as long as you can. You are guarantee to eventually die, either because of the antenna-looking enemies or because of a lucky shot of an enemy tank. The best strategy I found to survive longer and earn a high score (my records are below) is to keep going straight in one direction, and hit enemies that spawn in your field of view. As far as I can tell, there are no invisible walls to stop you; but the field is very nondescript, and when an enemy kills you it is literally impossible to tell using in-game clues where you respawn. 

I had a pleasant time with the game, besides the frustration of sometimes dying, respawning, and dying immediately again because you spawned right next to another tank. I do think it's not as solid a game as some of the others that came out in 1980 in arcades (first of all Pac-Man), so if I were actually in a 1980 arcade I'm not sure I'd spent my quarters on this one.

The game was later ported to home consoles/computers, but the Atari 2600 was NOT a first-person shooter, given that your tank is on the screen; the other versions are straightforward ports of the game, and don't seem to re-appear on the Wikipedia list, so we'll skip them.

As for our Chrono Review project, there is no real background to the story, no way to interact with the world, and not enough depth to the gameplay to deserve a RELATIVE rating; I could give it one, but most of the entries would be zeros, and it feels somewhat unfair to the game. I think this will happen a few more times in our project, so I decided to introduce the idea of NEXT blog entries instead, to be able to talk about the game in the Chronology but without needing to give it a rating. 

Next time we'll go back to the Adventure genre and play through the next game by Ken and Roberta Williams, "Wizard and the Princess". Until then, as usual, Let's keep retro-playing together.