[arcade sounds]
[typing]
[pew-pew sounds]
[MIDI music]
[LGR VO] Balls, yeah! Battlezone,
developed and published by Atari for the arcade in 1980.
It's a first-person tank combat game with an awesome cabinet design,
making use of two joysticks moving up and down only,
each controlling the respective treads on each side of your tank.
Fantastic stuff, and surprisingly intuitive, once you've had a moment of practice.
And not only do you get some sweet controls,
but you enter the zone of battle by looking into this periscope thing,
making it one of the very first virtual reality-style arcade games in existence.
The 19-inch Electrohome G05 Quadrascan vector graphics monitor behind the periscope lens
is where all the action happens, though,
and the gameplay could not be simpler.
You drive a tank
and the goal is to shoot everything that moves.
That includes other tanks like you, faster tanks, guided missiles
and even frigging low-flying UFOs.
Tanks and missiles can kill you,
so you'll want to learn to time your movements in such a way that you can avoid their murdering
and then proceed to murder them instead.
You start with a few lives and get an extra life at 15,000 and 100,000 points,
but otherwise, you'll just need to play it smart
with the right mix of offense and defense to stay alive and get a high score.
So due to this mix of simple yet addictive gameplay
and the novel control scheme and cabinet design
Battlezone was one of Atari's biggest hits of 1980 and '81,
and it was later made and remade several times over for various home systems.
And because two's company and three's a crowd,
just for you ochlophobics out there, we're gonna take a look at three of them:
the Commodore VIC-20, IBM PC and Atari ST conversions.
First up is the VIC-20 game,
developed and published by Atarisoft in 1983.
Now if you're not familiar with the VIC-20,
it was an early 8-bit home computer from Commodore,
equipped with a super-low res 3-bits-per-pixel graphics chip,
a 1.02 MHz CPU,
and just 5 KB of RAM.
By comparison, this banana has more computing power than a VIC-20,
but yet does IT run Battlezone?
Pfft! Don't be ridiculous!
Bananas only run in PAL format at 240 volts,
and Battlezone is an American game.
But, yeah, the fact that it runs and looks as good as it does on the VIC-20
is seriously impressive to me.
Sure, the 3D wireframe graphics are a big, fat phony
and the gameplay is noticeably clunkier,
but for an arcade game conversion on this system, I think it's superb.
Not only does it look and sound good for the system,
but the gameplay is all there, as far as I can tell.
Though the spawning of the enemies seems to be a bit more predictable than the arcade game
making it just a tad easier, but if it really bothers you,
you can always crank up the difficulty a few notches.
And there's the fact that it successfully attempts
to recreate the color overlay from the original vector graphics monitor.
That's just awesome! So I would definitely recommend tracking this cartridge down,
if you have a VIC.
The IBM PC booter version is next, also by Atarisoft in 1983.
And, ooh, this one's got some PC speaker music and an animated menu thingy.
[PC speaker version of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" plays]
It's also got some more options,
which is tailor-made for those of us that freely exercise our power and freedom to choose.
The graphics and sound are a tad lacking, but whatever.
It's a PC booter game from 1983, so you can get over it.
And another thing that's a tad lacking, or at least a bit odd, are the controls.
Instead of just holding in whatever direction you want to go,
you have to press the direction and then press the opposite direction
to stop yourself from moving the original direction.
It almost takes more getting used to than the original arcade cabinet's dual joystick controls.
But what it isn't lacking in is the gameplay,
which is freaking Battlezone and that's freaking rad.
You got armored fighting vehicles, aliens,
random volcanoes in the background,
heart attack-inducing missiles,
the whole nine yards, or 8.23 meters.
Unfortunately, this is a game that is entirely dependent on the CPU speed to run at the correct speed,
so if you play it on anything too much faster than an IBM PC or XT,
chances are it'll make a hummingbird wanna puke.
And you too.
Well, you--you as well.
I'd still recommend it, though, because it's Battlezone for old PCs
and yet it looks and plays pretty darn well,
even with the weird controls and speed issues.
Lastly is the Atari ST conversion,
developed by Andromeda Software and published by Atari in 1986.
Being for a later 16-bit computer,
it's obviously going to look and sound a lot better than the others we've looked at.
But it actually goes a step beyond simple aesthetics,
as the ST version actually emulates the original arcade machine's 6502 CPU in real time.
That means that the game's logic is actually pretty freaking dead on to the arcade game,
which is awesome, if you're awesome enough to see how awesome that is.
Well, at least it is at the proper difficulty level,
because otherwise the highest and lowest difficulties are far too forgiving and unforgiving, respectively.
Just tweak it to your liking, which for me is around Level 3,
and it turns into a pretty awesome version of the game.
And even though it deviates from the traditional green-on-black wireframe graphics for everything,
I like how it takes some liberties with the look
while still remaining unmistakably Battlezone.
This Atari ST game is just a cool little version
from a time when they still couldn't quite do arcade-perfect ports,
but they could jazz things up a bit with unique graphics and such.
So they did. And here it is.
Though, really, there's just still nothing like the original,
especially if you can find a place to play it in its original arcade cabinet,
not only for its unique control scheme but its excellent vector graphics,
which cannot be completely emulated on any kind of raster display.
There are still some great ports of it, though,
like the one included with Microsoft's Game Room,
which tries its very best to emulate all aspects of the arcade cabinet.
But however you can get your hands on it, just make sure you play it,
because Battlezone is a timeless arcade classic for a reason,
and is well worth the look.
[Battlezone arcade sounds]
Be sure to come back next week for more arcade games on Arcade August, here on LGR.
Ha ha ha!