This fairly faithful form of tank control feels like the main obstacle in Battlezone. Moving them in tandem moves you forward or back appropriately, but moving only the left or right joystick will allow the tank to turn. You can also see a few helpful bits of information on your screen like a radar, your score, and amount of remaining lives, but Atari tried their best to make something immersive with the technology of the time while still not hiding vital info from the player.Ĭontrolling the tank is done by way of two joysticks, each one controlling a tread on the tank. The player views all of this through the first-person perspective, a then novel way of portraying a shooting game made only more immersive if you find a cabinet with the periscope attachment that limits your field of view to the play area alone. The world is created through vector graphics, a system that draws lines to create shapes without filling them in with colors, meaning every object can be seen through be they barrier or enemy. A volcano erupts quietly in the distance as a crescent moon hangs in the sky, the world entirely rendered in lines of green if the overlay is placed on the system or rendered purely as black and white without it.
The arcade cabinet I found to play did feature a periscope though, meaning I’d get to experience Battlezone in its original intended format.īattlezone has the player take control of a tank in a large flat area littered with strange geometric shapes. Some might be superior for the changes they made if what I’ve heard of the Atari 2600 version is true, but the original arcade release feels like much of its appeal is based on its emulation of tank controls, although the periscope found on some arcade cabinets was not only an optional attachment but one many people preferred to do without. I’d contend that some things like driving games don’t require the immersive driver seat setup to provide the same challenge on a home console, but after its 1980 release, it would take many years for Battlezone’s dual joystick controls to be a standard part of game controllers, meaning most early ports came with inevitable compromises.
There are some arcade games that just don’t play the same without the original hardware.
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