*Combat is another Atari game, released for the Atari 2600. It’s based on two previous arcade games. One of them was called Tank; the other was called Jet Fighter. I’ll leave you to puzzle out what they were about.
*Okay, so this is purely a two-player game; there is no mode for single-player vs. computer as there has been thus far in . . . well, every game I’ve played for this project.
*So, one of the infamous things about Combat is that it boasted on the cover that it contained a whopping 27 games in one. We’ll see how that works out.
*Game one! Empty gameplay field; two tanks, one on each side of the battlefield! LET THE BATTLE BE-wait a minute, what the hell is thi-slow the **** down why are you spinning stop spin-STOP SPIN-whoa, there we go, okay FIRE WHEN READY FIRE FI-STOP ******* SPINNING WHY ARE YOU JUST SITTING THERE OKAY SPIN NOW NOW NOOOOOOOWWWWWWW WHY ARE YOU NOT SPINNING NOW WHY ARE YOU – oh times up. Cool, that was fun.
*So, I’m playing this on the Atari flashback console. This is the first game I’ve played on the console with the joystick controllers. Pong & Breakout both used paddle controllers, but on this one you have to use the joysticks.
*And, yes, so here is a moment of video game history. The introduction of my most hated control scheme. I always knew that this scheme was called “Tank controls.” For some reason, until I started playing this game, I had never put together that they were called that because there was literally a game called Tank that used those controls. So, yeah, I hate these controls. Let’s talk about them.
*Basically, to go forward, you push the joystick to the top and you go forward in whatever direction you’re facing. So, if you want to go left and you push to go left, you will just rotate in place endlessly. You have to push left, let off once you have rotated to the angle you want and then push forward.
*This led to the first game to basically be a complete cluster**** as both tanks rotated in place, fired wildly and crept along the playfield walls.
*But we figured it out and got it to work. They’re still quite clumsy in terms of having no real ability to be precise at all. Hard to stop where you wanted to stop when you were turning or to get there at all. But perhaps this simply duplicates the clumsy, not-very-precise motion of actual tanks.
*There is a fairly short time-limit on each round; I didn’t think to time them to see how long. Anyway, the tanks duel with a hit blowing the tank around in a circle. It’s a scored game, not a simple shoot-and-destroy. At the end of the round, however long that is, the winner is the one who hit the other tank the most.
*I noticed this with Boot Hill as well: when the round ends, nothing flashes up to tell you the round is over, you simply lose control of the game, which is confusing to me. In Boot Hill, the computer actually took over both characters, so it appeared that you were still playing when you weren’t, which would always confuse me. Since the tanks were so unresponsive in this game, I found myself often assuming that my tank had stopped moving because it was stupid and so I would continue desperately slamming the joystick around for a few seconds, until I figured out that the round was over. Weird.
*Oh, by the way, this game has a constant rumble as a soundtrack. I guess it’s supposed to be the sound of the tank’s engines, but, boy, does it get annoying after a while. The gunshots are fine as are the Pong-esque sounds on later levels, but as soon as you start a level, there’s just an all-encompassing growling sound that never stops. At first, I thought my speakers were acting up, but no, it’s just that the game designers figured that people wanted to play games against the backdrop of blown out speakers rumbling. Well, whatever. I do have better speakers than anybody would have had in 1977, I reckon. Probably wasn’t as loud and unpleasant then.
*Oh, ha ha, I see here that back in 1977 when it was first released, the game actually received specific praise for its sound effects. Okay, I mean, what do I know? I am playing this game forty years after it came out, so I guess they did something right.
*OK, game two. Same mechanics, same rules, but the screen has some obstacles on it. Game three, same mechanics, same rules, but the screen has even more obstacles on it.
*Some might say that those aren’t exactly three separate games, but just, you know, one game with three slightly different levels.
*Some might say.
*I should mention that I’m playing these levels until I beat my playing partner; because my goal is to win these games, right? Luckily, my playing partner is even worse than I am at this, so things are going along at a nice clip.
*Okay, so “game” 4 & “game” 5 are exactly . . .
*Wait a minute here.
*Oh my God. Hold the phone. Apparently, levels 1, 2 & 4 are “guided” missile levels where you can control your projectile after you fire it with the joystick; levels 3 & 5 are just purely straight shots. Okay, I guess I gotta go back and look at those. Okay, so hang on then, we gotta look at those again.
*Just for fun. I already won them. But still.
*Okay, well, let me press on here because my friend & I shotgunned through a ton of levels on our first playthrough, so I’ll have to go back and look at the “guided missile” mechanic on our next playtime.
*So, levels 6 & 7 introduce the Tank Pong mechanic. In the first five levels shots would just vanish off screen when they reached the edges of the screen or disappear when they hit obstacles. Now the projectiles bounce off the obstacles and the edges of the screen. Levels . . . oh, wait, I beg your pardon: “GAMES” 6 & 7 are the same as earlier screens.
*Okay, hold up, we gotta start moving here. Anyway, I have gone back and played the guided missile levels attempting to guide the missiles, so let’s just run through these like a madman.
*First, we have the Tank Games: Open Field Guided Missile; Easy Maze Guided Missile; Easy Maze Straight Missile; Complex Maze Guided Missile; Complex Maze Straight Missile.
*The guided missile thing is a cool idea, I don’t know that it’s all that usable. In the Open Field maybe, but it’s hard to curve it around obstacles on the maze levels for sure. But it is real.
*Next up are the Tang-Pong games: Easy Maze Direct/Billiard Hit; Complex Maze Direct/Billiard Hit; Open Field Billiard Hit; Easy Maze Billiard Hit.
*I will just say at this point that the Pong games are way more fun than the regular games. In the Billiard Hit only levels, your shot HAS to ricochet at least once in order for a hit to count and that’s also really fun.
*In these levels, it was very hard to predict, especially on the maze levels, where your shots would go, so it was always fun to just take a wild shot and then have it hit or to be chugging along completely hidden from your opponent on the other side of the screen and suddenly a missile bounces in and blows you up.
*I do have one gripe. I think that it would have been even more fun if you could blow yourself up. On the Pong levels, if your own missile bounces back into you, it just passes through you harmlessly. How much fun would it be if you actually blew up when you accidentally shot yourself? A lot. A lot of fun.
*Still, the Tank games were . . . okay. The Tank-Pong games were actually fun; lot of laughs on the Tank-Pong Maze levels. Best so far: Tank-Pong: Complex Maze Direct/Billiard Hit.
*Next up, things hit a new level of ridiculousness. Yes, it’s Invisible Tank Games: Open Field Guided Missiles; Easy Maze Guided Missiles.
*Yes, it’s true. You cannot see your opponent at all. Since you’re both using the same screen, you also can’t see yourself at all. You briefly pop into view when you fire, so you can get an idea of where your opponent is when they shoot at you and also, even more useful, get some idea of where the hell you are when you fire.
*Never before have guided missiles been so utterly useless.
*So, these two are basically a wash. It’s just down to pure luck essentially. You can kind of see where your opponent is when they fire but since you can’t really even tell what direction you’re pointing in until you fire, what good is that?
*A hidden movement game would be cool, where you could see your tank, but not your opponents and vice versa. But you’d need two screens or maybe a couple of pairs of some kind of special glasses. That would be good.
*But I would see where I was when I fired and then I would start just booking it across the map to where I thought my opponent was and then I would fire again and I would be way on the other side of the map than where I thought I would be, desperately firing into a dead end corner.
*Okay, the next category is the Invisible Tank-Pong Games: Easy Maze Direct/Billiard Hit; Open Field Billiard Hit; Easy Maze Billiard Hit.
*These are more fun than the regular Invisible Tank levels for the same reason the Pong levels are more fun than the regular Tank levels. In this one, you have the added thing of not knowing where anyone is AND also having no idea where your shot is going to go. They’re fine for a few minutes.
*So, let’s pause for a moment for a couple of reasons. We are now over half-way through all of the “games” that make up Combat. There are, of course, 27 games total and we have now gone through fourteen of them. I leave it up to you to decide if all of these deserve to be called different games. I might be tempted to say that this is one game with a few different levels. But that doesn’t move units.
*So, that’s all the tank games. Let’s move on to the BI-PLANE GAMES!
*You know, Combat is mostly famous for its tank combat. Of course that does make up the majority of the game. Still, it kind of doesn’t bode particularly well in terms of how good these next levels are going to be.
*OK, so the map is different in these games. There are no obstacles, but there are two giant clouds that are in the middle of the screen on some of the maps. On other maps, the clouds aren’t there and it’s just an open field.
So, here are the various Bi-Plane Games: Clouds Guided Missiles; Clouds Straight Missiles; Clouds Machine Guns; Open Skies Machine Guns; 2 vs. 2 Open Skies Guided Missiles; 1 vs. 3 Open Skies Straight Missiles.
*The deal with the clouds is that you can fly into them and your opponent can’t see you. Of course, neither can you.
*Still, let me tell you, the best thing about the cloud levels is the moment when both players just dive into the clouds so you can’t see either plane and then suddenly there’s an explosion and one of the players comes spinning out of the cloud having been hit. That’s just pretty satisfying.
*The mechanics of the plane levels is quite a bit different from the tank levels. For one thing, you can go from side to side, ie when you exit the right side of the screen, you instantly reappear on the left. Same with up & down and even diagonals. This is also really satisfying when your opponent is chasing you and firing at you and then you just drop off the bottom of the screen and suddenly you’re the one diving down at this steep angle right toward your opponent.
*Not that I managed to pull that off a whole lot.
*Also, you are constantly in motion. You are always flying, heading whatever direction you happen to be facing.
*So, the joystick doesn’t function like it did with the tanks. You go left to slow down, right to speed up. This can be handy in dodging shots. Or it would if I could ever do it right. Up & down are the dive & climb directions. You can also angle right or left on both climbing and diving.
*By the way, you can go up on the stick or down on the stick. This will cause you to either climb or dive. Which one would you think would be which? Oh, you imagine you would go up to climb and down to dive? WELL YOUR ******* WRONG BITCH
*Yeah, so, for some reason, if you want to go toward the TOP of the screen, you pull your stick toward the BOTTOM of your controller and vice versa. Does this have some basis in reality as in flying a real airplane or something? I can’t think of any other reason they’d do it this way, but, boy, it is counter intuitive.
*And even if you do push the stick away from you to dive and pull it toward you to climb in a real plane, which I think, yeah, actually that is right now that I think about it, you’ve got to understand that we’re not in a plane perspective now. I’m not flying from the pilot’s eye view where this might be a bit more intuitive. I’m flying while watching the plane move from left to right on a flat backdrop. I think it would be way better if it worked in a top-top down-down way than if the stick tried to simulate a real airplane while the player is playing with the view of a side-scroller. That’s very counter-intuitive.
*All in all, I am finding the controls on the Bi-Plane levels to be way harder than the controls on the Tank levels. Let’s see if I can get any better.
*Okay, I got better. It was a perspective thing. Once I was able to kind of visualize me actually being in the cockpit, the up-down, down-up thing got easy.
*These levels are all exactly what they sound like. The 1 vs. 3 level is kind of interesting. One player controls three bi-planes and the other player controls one large bomber. The bomber fires one large projectile and the bi-planes all fire one projectile in unison. It’s actually different and is a nice twist. Having a larger field of fire and yet also being a larger target yourself is just enough of a change to make it interesting after you’ve played through level after level of essentially the same thing.
*Okay, let’s move on to the jet games. I’m honestly getting tired of this game.
*So, there are seven jet-fighter levels . . .
*Oh my God, SEVEN? Really? *sigh*
*So, there’s Clouds Guided Missiles; Clouds Straight Missiles; Open Skies Guided Missiles; Open Skies Straight Missiles; 2 vs. 2 Clouds Guided Missiles; 1 vs. 3 Open Skies Guided Missiles; 2 vs. 2 Open Skies Straight Missiles.
*This is the most asinine thing I have ever done.
*So, the jet levels have yet another set of controls. The speed controls are now up & down instead of left & right. Left & right turn the plane in those directions. The view is also top down again, because viewing a jet from the side just isn’t as cool as viewing that classic triangle shape from above. That’s why you turn right and left, instead of climbing & diving. I found switching to this control scheme easier than I did switching to the bi-plane control scheme.
*I don’t guess I have much of anything to say about these. They’re the same as the bi-plane levels really only the jets do move faster. Otherwise, you know.
*So, final thoughts. I think this is definitely the worst game I’ve played so far. I just got really bored with it. It’s fun at first, but a lot of the different levels are basically the same. The Guided Missiles don’t make much difference; the clouds don’t make much difference; etc. I would say the best levels are for sure the tank levels.
*Of the other games I’ve played, I’ve only gotten tired of one before and that was Breakout, mainly because I just kind of hit a wall and wasn’t getting any better on the console version. Pong & Boot Hill were definitely really fun and I even played them more than this project required. I also liked Oregon Trail just as a very simple, entertaining piece of history. I would definitely recommend playing all of those.
*I would not recommend playing Combat actually. If you must, I would say the only levels that are like super-fun are the Tank Pong levels, so the tank levels where the missiles ricochet off the walls/obstacles. Play those if you really feel the need to check out this game at all. But, unless you’re doing some sort of a historical project like I am, I’d recommend just never playing this game.
*Okay, well, that’s the, what, fifth game I’ve played so far and the first one that I haven’t liked. Doing pretty good, I’d say. You know, one terrible game to every four good ones. That’s a pretty good ratio.
*Except I just remembered that this list has 1001 games on it which means current stats indicate I’m going to be running into 200 terrible games. Well, let’s hope the statistics don’t tell the whole story there.
*Next time, we’ll move on to 1978 to play a game that, even among this group of games, towers above the crowd. Join me next time for Space Invaders!