Welcome to Part II of our look at the arcade games in the Atari Greatest Hits Vol. 1 collection released on the Nintendo DS in 2010. For Part I covering Asteroids and Space Duel, you can check out our article here. Now that I think about it, I do not think I will be doing these types of intros for every article because, by the end of this series, there will just be an entire lead-up full of games and hyperlinked titles, but maybe I will continue with the arcade games. The article today will look at two games, Battlezone and The Bradley Trainer, which technically was not an arcade game, but it was heavily based off of Battlezone and it seemed more likely that it was not designed to run off an Atari 2600, so we decided to include it here as well.
Battlezone
I have played the real Battlezone arcade game a few times in my life and has always been a game that I end up playing because no one else is playing it and I am looking for something to play. The presentation here is actually pretty nice and modified somewhat for the smaller screen. The regular game gives you text in the upper left that tells you if are in range of an enemy and if an enemy tank is to your right or left, but as was the case with Asteroid, the text is pretty blurry and hard to read. Thankfully, that same text is presented on the bottom of the DS screen in a large and easy-to-read font, so when you hear the alarm sounding, it is just a quick glance down to see if you need to steer left or right to find your target.
However, the gameplay is pretty sluggish, essentially being a vector first-person shooter. Your tank cannon can only fire one shot at a time and you cannot fire again until your initial shot has faded into the background. I set the controls to simple, which had my driving the tank with just the directional pad rather than forward/back with the directional pad and left-right with the Y/A buttons, but even then, being able to accurately hit enemy tanks and the faster moving UFOs can be difficult. And then you have the enemy tanks that actively hunt you and while trying to turn the tank to find out why your alarm is blaring at you. I can only imagine that the two tanks are just driving in circles around each other a rather hilarious sight from an alternative camera angle. There were also several times that upon respawning, the alarm began blaring immediately and I was shot less than five seconds later. I understand the game, I just do not think that I am a fan.
Verdict: No
- Game 1: 11,000
- Game 2: 4,000
- Game 3: 12,000
- Game 4: 4,000
- Game 5: 9,000
- Game 6: 4,000
The Bradley Trainer
Well hmmm. I am not really sure how to approach this one.
The Bradley Trainer (aka Army Battlezone) was a modified version of the arcade game Battlezone, a tank first-person shooter where you attack other tanks, but also alien UFOs while driving around in a mountainous and volcanic landscape. In The Bradley Trainer, you are the gunner in an unmovable tank (sort of) and can only rotate your gun turret but can also change the angle of your cannon. You also have more firing options such as different types of guns [7.62 mm machine gun, high explosive (single shot), Armor-piercing (slow fire), TOW missile, and a couple of others]. You can also affect the range of your shots as well as zooming in your camera/periscope to see further away enemies, which in this game appear to be only other tanks and helicopters.
Now, because you can only rotate the cannon and not move forward/backward, one would assume that the enemy is not going to be a crack shot and mercilessly hunt you because you would need to be a quick shot on hitting enemy tanks the moment they are in range along with shooting down helicopters. Helicopters are fast. But unlike Battlezone, there is no visual indication when you are within range. Because of the increased complexities in this game, taking gun type, enemy range, canon angle, and enemy type into account, this was not designed as a 25-cent arcade play and a person coming into this game would need more of a primer than walking up and plunking down a quarter. And without knowing how all of the components in the game worked, I found myself pretty lost as far as what I could do and why I was unable to destroy a tank at point-blank range while seemingly unloading round after round of Armor-piercing single shot into said tank. Were the 'plinking' sound effects telling me that I was hitting the tank or that the armor-piercing shells were not doing their job?
But hey, I did manage to (somehow) shoot down a helicopter that nabbed me 100,000 points and I have visual evidence of my score. But I also just sat there after playing for 10 minutes without taking a hit, waiting to die so that I could record my high score, but for whatever reason, there was no return fire. So I powered down the game feeling a bit indestructible, but still a bit confused. I get why this game was included, and I am glad that it was for historical game preservation, but it would have been nice to have a manual included for the complexities in this game as well to know what anything does.
Verdict: No.
Game 1: 100,000.
So those were the two tank games that used vector graphics, neither of which grabbed my interest beyond what I played here. Although, even though I gave Battlezone a "No" vote, I could actually see myself coming back and playing it while playing other Atari arcade games in this collection. But that was the presentation here as I will definitely play Battlezone if I see it in an arcade because I think it just works better as an arcade game with the pedals and the tank-joystick throttle thing.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
No Energy for Anger
No Energy for Anger
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