Not every company that I introduce with an early catalog retrospective is going to be important or prolific. You have companies like Capcom, who, as I chronicled in my last post, debuted with a handful of modest titles, had a major breakout hit before the year's end, and went to be one of the world's largest and longest continually operating game developers, still producing multiple high budgeted franchises to this day. But then you have companies like Realtime Games, a minor British bedroom coder who launched with a couple of Atari game clones, and are only distinguished today by a few lesser whales produced some years later. Their most notable products may have actually been their ports of Elite and Starglider, but this blog isn't concerned with ports apart from a few exceptions, and these aren't among them.
I'm not very excited to be covering this particular chapter right now, but their output that I find interesting for its own sake is far enough removed from 1984 that it feels wrong to put their launch games off until then. So now, I cover their early games 3D Tank Duel and 3D Starstrike, two unofficial ZX Spectrum conversions of Atari's most successful 3D vector games, as discretionary whales.
Game 353: 3D Tank Duel
Apologies for the bad video quality - I used Fuse's built-in video recorder this time without testing it first and I didn't feel like replaying once I realized it introduces horrendous compression artifacts. At least the framerate is accurate.
This is Battlezone, but with a bit of color in the backgrounds, a low resolution, and a worse framerate, which, along with what feel like smaller enemy hitboxes (and a tendency for enemy tanks to randomly disappear and turn into seeker missiles) makes for a game that feels more difficult than the original Atari game. Hitting a moving target that looks like a jittery mess of jagged lines is hard enough, and not in a fun or satisfying way, and trying to discern an incoming shell composited over that mess so that it might be dodged is hopeless.
I will note that my average lifespan went up considerably once I learned to listen for the bleep sound indicating a shot was fired. It sounds more like a radar ping, and nothing like cannon fire, but once I used it as my cue to back away at an angle, as I always had in Battlezone, I could usually dodge return fire, unless I was too close to begin with, or if I backed into an obstacle.
The main differences I observed, apart from aesthetic and performance degradation, were a slower pace, slower difficulty escalation, and, weirdly, smarter AI that deliberately uses cover, though the effect mainly serves to prolong combat.
GAB rating: Below average. I can see this being somewhat fun in short bursts to a kid living in 1980's Britain without many options for getting an arcade fix, but it's pointless in an age where MAME exists.
An official, Atari-approved Spectrum port by Quicksilva came out the same year, and it preserves the arcade game's monochrome look, but I couldn't get any of the controls to work except for firing the gun.
Game 354: 3D Starstrike
This is actually not too shabby a conversion! No points for originality - it's a straightforward, unauthorized port with the expected downgrades in resolution, sounds, and bells & whistles, but it's pretty complete in terms of gameplay, with all of the Star Wars arcade phases presented, plus a brief reactor strike stage to replace the final bombing run.
Avoiding hits does feel more difficult than the arcade game, due to a combination of factors including dodgy hitboxes, the framerate and resolution, and lack of analog controls, but in turn you can take a lot more punishment, and each round completed gives you a decent chunk of shields back. Apart from that, the most obvious gameplay change is the addition of a laser power meter, but it recharges so quickly that it almost doesn't make a difference. I was able to finish a round on "very hard" difficulty, the equivalent of beginning on round 7.
GAB rating: Average. Once again, I can see this being a good value in its era when you couldn't just fire up MAME and emulate the real thing. The end result is more playable and more fun than Tank Duel, and I've certainly seen worse Star Wars computer games than this, but I didn't see much need to play this for more than a few minutes.
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