1001 Games To Play Before You Die: #0011 Battle Zone

Monday, June 9, 2014

#0011 Battle Zone

Alrighty! Now that Compy is back to her normalish self again! I can finally get back into playing my way through old games that nobody cares about anymore. And today’s distant memory that your parents might remember is Battlezone! Probably the first ever tank simulator published by Atari in 1980. That’s right folks! We’re officially in the 80s now! a LOT of gems come out this decade so I’m PUMPED! Anywho, Battlezone is a tank simulator and I must say, look at this thing! I mean, seriously! that is probably the most unique and immersive cabinet I’ve ever seen! You use the sticks to control your tank, and the button on the top fires an exploding dot at the enemy tank. In order to see you must look through this porthole that apparently always smells like feet and old band aids. Just like a real tank! As cool as this design for the cabinet is, the real impressive thing are the graphics. Done in vectors, because it would seem that Atari has a vector fetish, and it actually works surprisingly well! I mean, more so than pixels could in this case. See, this is the first game that I have played on my journey to attempt 3-D graphics. And, well, they pull it off! I’m serious! Here we are, 1980 and we have honest to goodness scaling! Not even the pixelated “scaling” that the SNES tried with several games, the vectors look like honest to goodness wire frames that shrink and grow depending on how close or far you are from the object.

So how does the game hold up? Surprisingly well actually. The graphics have aged nicely into something that’s retro, but still looks good. The controls are simple, and immersive, and honestly I was impressed, maybe even more than I was with Galaxian. I highly recommend it!

Next up: Defender

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Why I'm taking this challenge

So! I’ve spent nearly my entire life as a Nintendo Fanboy. A rabid fanboy to the point where when my family got a brand new Playstation 2 back in ‘02 (One of the best consoles ever). I refused to play it. I refused to have anything to do with the company that stole my beloved Nintendo’s thunder! This fanboyism ran rampant in my gaming life through high school and even when I moved out to live with the woman who would one day become my wife. I still didn’t play anything but Nintendo consoles. In fact, it wasn’t until we were gifted an Xbox 360 did I FINALLY play a game on a different console. That was Bioshock, it was also the first shooter I had ever played.It became one of my favorite games of all time. The rest is history, I’ve been playing games on any console I want now.

That’s all well and good, but this means that there is an entire other gaming WORLD that I’ve never played. Never experienced in my life. I love shooters, but with the exception of the half-life series, and System shock 2, every shooter from Doom all the way up until Bioshock, I’ve never played. Not Quake, not CoD, not battlefield.

So, since I’ve missed out on nearly 30 years of gaming, I decided to take a challenge. My lovely wife got me a book called 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die I am going to play through every game in this book. Starting with Oregon Trail (1971) and finish with Bioshock Infinite (2013) I plan to do at least one generation per year. At least. And to help me keep track of what I've done, I started doing small reviews of every game.

At first I wrote these in the starment.net forums, but eventually they became too lengthy to only be posted there, so I created this blog to not only help keep me organized, but so others can follow along as well. It won't be easy, but I think it's worth it to play games that I may otherwise never have played.