Game 8: Battle City (1985)

This game was a complete unknown to us and we had not heard of it until browsing through the list on Wikipedia. That being said, it was by far the most surprising of the first few games we played, coming off as an updated version of the Atari 2600 game Combat. While I never owned Combat, or an Atari, I still played it a few times at neighbor's houses, and it was one of the best games anyone I knew owned for the Atari, mostly due to having enjoyable two player action. The basic gameplay in Combat and Battle City is simple: you kill other tanks and avoid getting blown up in the process.

Pew pew pew, shooting through the terrain is pretty neat.

Battle City adds the twist (at the cost of alternate vehicles) of being able to destroy terrain, making the levels more flexible and reactive. It also comes with plenty of different levels, ranging from the simple to the slightly less simple. In addition, there is a rudimentary level editor, which is pretty interesting in its own right. This is the the first level editor we've seen, and the earliest one that I am personally aware of. I was not able to find a history of level editors with quick Google search, but I'd love to hear about earlier ones.

Varied terrain and obstacles, and explosions falling off the screen.

The graphics in this game are rudimentary at best. There is nothing horrible about them, and they are quite adequate in all things considered, but they are blocky and nothing looks that nice. There is no real animation to speak of. The sound is similar. Once again though, we were more surprised by the level editor and the general strangeness of this game. Like Ice Climbers, there is no goal, despite the plethora of discrete stages to conquer. You can play the levels in any order you like, and there is no objective beyond "EXTERMINATE." This isn't surprising, but I am looking forward to a day when we can actually "beat" the games we play.

I am always excited for level editors, and then I realize I have no plans.

All of this being said, I'd like to stress how unexpected and surprising the level editor was for us. It is not something I remember from console gaming until the fifth generation of consoles, almost a decade after this release. While it's clear that there were earlier games that had a level editing capabilities on the console, the first that I remember is Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. I was aware of level editors for PC games, especially FPS and RTS ones, but as we grew up in a Macintosh household, most of this was unavailable for us. What I do remember about the THPS2 editor was the disappointment I felt when using it.

We started to write Power-ups and Bickering, but ran out of space on "w."

It's not that the editor was too hard to use, or too complicated, or anything like that. It was the simple fact that I had no idea what I wanted my level to be. To add to that, no ideas came pouring out of me, like I had hoped they would. I was sure that I was going to design an AWESOME TOTALLY RAD MONDO COOL level to skate around in and show off to my friends, but nothing happened. I felt the same absence of creativity when playing with the Battle City editor. Our relative newness to the game, combined with our lack of a plan, resulted in us having no idea what to do with the editor, besides screw around and take the above screen shots. That being said, there is still interest in this game. I present to you, Binary City: