Space Battle (Intellivision, 1980)
Entry posted by Mezrabad
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Space Battle (Intellivision, 1980)
This is a neat game, and I've never played anything like it (up till 1980).
Okay, you've got this base at the center of your little universe from the perspective of your Radar screen. You defend it with three squadrons of three fighters each. Surrounding your base is the utter void of space through which your enemies approach. There's always five groups of these enemies...I don't know why, something to do with how they evolved...coming from the outer boundaries of your radar's scanning range and from any two-dimensional, XY-axis-type of direction.
Each alien squadron seems to have from 8 to 14 or so craft in them. So, real quickly, you've got to figure out which squad will reach your station first, which ones are more important to take out first, how many of your squadrons do you commit to attacking what's coming in and what do you leave behind to defend the base? Well, since you've only got three squadrons and they are virtually identical in composition, the general procedure is to send two out (any two of the three) and leave one to hang out at the base.
So you send out the two lucky ones, we'll call them White and Blue, because that's their color, unless you send out Gold instead. In this case we'll just let Gold stay behind and perhaps be anhiliated by the hordes that White and Blue can't stop. Moving on, let's say you send Blue out to attack an isolated alien squadron coming in fast and you send White to a clump of three squadrons leaving one lone alien squadron to continue in unintercepted. Let me tell you what happens when one of your squadrons meet up with the little white alien dots.
If your Blue squadron hits a swarm of alien ships you'll be able to enter battle with them. This involves a change of screen-ery as your radar screen is replaced by a starfield and a targetting reticle. You move the reticle around to shoot the alien "saucer" ships. Your shots take time to get to the ships (there's a slight 3d perspective, a little like parts of Atari's Star Ship title) so when you shoot at the boogers you have to shoot where you think they will be by the time your shots get there. I think it's called "leading" your target, except that's a silly term because they're not exactly "following" your targetting reticle, right? As if to prove my point about our silly semantic habits, the saucers will often make a sudden looping maneuver just before the shot you just fired gets to them. I think this is called "evasive action", a term the etymology of which I am ignorant, so I can't bitch about it. Regardless, it's easy to miss. The trick is to not only "lead" the targets, but to also try to shoot where you think they might be if they were to suddenly loop. So, this activity ranges from easy to super hard depending on the skill rating you've chosen to play at (ranging from beginning to super advanced) and involves some interesting quirks.
One Quirk is that when you destroy an alien ship, it explodes with triradial symmetry, the debris from this pretty explosion can take out other ships, which, in their time of passing, also spawn flaming wreckage that can destroy other ships who have their own debris sprays. This can create a nice little chain of events from your perspective, though you can imagine the pilots of those ships saying "crap, triradial symmetry sucks!" as they perish in space-flames.
They fight back, too, (Quirk Two) shooting two white dots, which are harmless, that get bigger and turn red, which are deadly--though there's only ever one pair of dots you have to worry about at a time. These two dots seem easy to avoid but get embrassingly good at predicting where your reticle will be on the tougher settings. If these macro-pixels hit your targetting reticle, you've lost a fighter. Lose all three fighters and you've lost your squadron. What's left of the enemy continues towards your mother ship with a happy little skip in their step.
In these battles, you have to destroy a certain number of ships, all of them, to be exact, but stay your hand, Killer, you may want to rethink that. While your Blue is in battle and you're moving around your reticle and making the ships explode into weird geometric terms, your other squadron, the White, may have reached their objective and are getting their probability-controlled buttocks handed to them. This is off-screen Real-Time action (Quirk--what are we up to? Three?)! The rest of the universe doesn't pause while you fight, (at least not on the harder skill settings), the aliens get closer to your mother ship and squadrons that meet in battle will fight whether you're there to control them or not. An off-screen battle will take out one of your pilots for every three of theirs. Sometimes, you have to let this happen, so maybe send your less-likely-to-be-attended squadron to one of the smaller swarms of aliens. If you wish, you can jump out of your Blue battle, knowing your three remaining pilots can, most likely, mop up the remaining aliens, so you can go to assist White with their problems. It's your choice and it's really cool, because it means there's more happening here than just freakish hand-eye coordination. You've got to keep the bigger picture in mind at all times.
Anyway, if you're in battle and one of the alien swarms reaches your mother ship, you'll hear klaxons which will increase in their klaxoning until Galact-, er, your "mother ship" is destroyed. At this point, you'll realize, when you're dumped to the Radar screen and it's flashing red, that you're sucking vacuum and it's game over.
Why the hell doesn't the Mother Ship have any guns on her? Stupid engineers.
If you take out all of the aliens, then it's All Clear and you've won. Good luck seeing this moment on the Super Advanced setting.
This is a smart game and on the harder settings you have to think smart to play it. For the record, I can reach the All Clear on the Advanced setting most of the time, but the Super Advanced says to me "Here's your Turtle Wax, thanks for playing, Loser!" and then spits on my vaccuum damaged corpse.
Don't be fooled into thinking Space Battle is just about shooting ships.
Next entry we'll do Golf or some other sporty, mundane, real-world reflection title. 22947
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