Battlezone

Battlezone presented a bit of complexity when it comes to emulating the experience. There's "some complexity" to emulating anything, of course, especially arcade cabinets which are designed to be experienced in bars and movie theaters and loud, dark, crowded arcades, not my bedroom. Battlezone in particular has a nonstandard input method; two large joysticks, right next to each other. The game uses tank controls in the most literal sense. You are driving a tank from a first-person perspective, and you move the sticks forward and backward to control the individual treads. Both forward moves you forward, both backwards moves you back, one in each direction turns on the spot. You also have a trigger to fire your cannon in front of you, which operates on Space Invaders rules, you can only have one bullet active at a time. The thing about this control scheme, aside from being really neat, is that it does not map cleanly onto my HORI RAP4 Kai, so I had to pull out the DualSense and map each joystick to one of my analog sticks. This is certainly not ideal, but it's the best I could do with my current resources. For all its faults, it worked fine, and it let me play Battlezone, which I really enjoyed!

First, and most obvious, it's got a killer look. Green wireframe models on a black background, a backdrop of jagged mountain ranges, the moon hanging in the sky. This game looks awesome, it looks like what people thought video games were in the early 80s. Aside from looking cool, it also marks a big leap forward from the first-person raster graphics of Star Raiders. There's a real palpable sense of depth here. You're not just seeing sprites scale up and down as they move closer or farther away, the enemy tanks and random objects strewn around the field are fully 3D models that can rotate 360 degrees in your perspective and be placed arbitrarily, and it works. As a graphical simulation, it's got an excellent sense of verisimilitude, and the "wow" factor is off the charts.

Unfortunately, in terms of play experience, I'm not sure it fares as well. Now, don't get me wrong, I think it's a really interesting and fun game to pick up and play for a bit, and the sense of realism in the graphics actually carries through in a lot of ways. Unlike Space Invaders or Galaxian, your movement limitations don't feel arbitrary, they read as faithful simulations of the depicted combat scenario. It's got the freedom of movement of Asteroids, but slowed way down to accommodate the 3D graphics and first-person view, which place a greater computational load on both the arcade cabinet and the average player. Coming to grips with how to maneuver from this perspective, while dealing with enemy attacks, is a really interesting challenge, and makes for a great first impression.

The limitations start to show before long, though, and the game settles into an unfortunately monotonous rhythm. Each time you take out an enemy tank, a new one will spawn in, nearby, at a seemingly random position and heading. After this has gone on for some time, it'll occasionally drop in a quick-moving ship that descends from the sky and scrambles back and forth, serpentining toward you, before picking an angle from which to dart straight toward your position. Neither of these enemies are particularly complex to deal with, and you're never even afforded the novelty of needing to handle both at once. The scrambler in particular is eminently solvable; simply keep it in your view, but don't bother trying to zero in on it until it stops serpentining. When it charges, you'll only have a short time to line up the shot, but it's super easy to hit it. The tanks don't fare that much better. It can be a smidge tricky to hit them while they're moving orthogonally to your heading, as it requires you to lead your shot pretty precisely, but if you're looking at them and they're not yet looking at you, it's usually pretty easy to take them out without ever landing in danger. On the other hand, if you're not yet looking at them, it's best to just run away at a 45 degree angle until they get out of range so you can turn around unmolested. I believe you can technically move while turning, by pressing one lever forward or backward while keeping the other neutral, but it doesn't give you enough movement to really avoid incoming attacks, so for the most part you're better off just getting somewhere safe before trying to adjust your heading, which doesn't make for a super interesting or dynamic play experience.

That said, I could probably get on board with this rhythm of tactical retreat and reorientation, if not for what I view as the fatal flaw in this game's mechanical structure: If you run away from a tank for long enough, it'll just despawn, and spawn in a new enemy instead. I really can't stress enough how disappointed I was to realize this, it essentially reduces the combat loop to a simple question of whether or not you already have the upper hand on each enemy. If you do, just kill them easily. If you don't, run away until it spawns in another one, and see how your chances look now. The game becomes a series of short, easy encounters, occasionally punctuated by one which could potentially be more difficult, if not for the fact that the optimal strategy for surviving it simply bypasses it entirely.

There's still fun to be had here, to be sure. The bonus UFOs, borrowed from Asteroids, are satisfying to take out, especially when you get good enough to do it from a distance, and I never stopped being charmed by the visual of the windshield cracking when you get taken out by an enemy bullet. This game definitely has some sauce to it, and it's clearly an impressive technical showcase, I just don't think the staying power is quite there. An extremely strong first impression gives way to monotony as it becomes apparent just how limited the gameplay really is, and I ended up falling out of love with the game as quickly as I fell into it.