Games 441-442: Tank Battalion & Battle City

Our next whale, Namco's Battle City, is a minor one, and is one of the earliest third-party games developed specifically for the Famicom.

As it is a successor to an even lesser non-whale, I'll be playing that first.

Game 441: Tank Battalion

Scan by The Arcade Flyer Archive

 

It's hard to believe it, but this ugly-looking, clumsily-playing maze shooter came out almost simultaneously with the sublime Pac-Man! It feels like it should be a generation older.

I get ahead of myself, but Tank Battalion isn't very impressive.

The idea is fairly original and anticipates some aspects of tower defense strategy, making it a welcome break from the countless Space Invaders clones of the time. You drive a tank through a fully destructible maze and have to protect your base, represented by an eagle insignia, from an enemy tank battalion. This would be impossible if they were smart enough to coordinate and flank your base from multiple directions at once, but the AI is erratic and very stupid, so instead this is merely frustrating. The tanks don't pose much threat to you, but you can't be everywhere at once, your own firepower is limited to one shot on screen at a time, which can easily miss thanks to the enemies' unpredictable movements, and if they land a single hit on the base, it's an instant game over no matter how many spare lives you have. Consequently, there are times when you may want to sacrificially throw your own tank in front of an incoming shell in order to save the base and reset the attack pattern.

Both you and the enemies can destroy walls in the maze, which ought to provide a lot of strategic options that you otherwise wouldn't have. But this feels like wasted potential - you can only strategize so much when the enemies follow no discernible pattern or logic, and methods of reshape the maze to your advantage feel limited to optimizing your own mobility through it. Perhaps there are reliable mazing strategies that come with experience and feel, but thanks to poor framerate and unresponsive controls, I felt no desire to stick with it any longer than I did - after beating the third wave, where the maze walls disappear entirely, I decided that I'd seen enough.

GAB rating: Below average, borderline bad. The concept is decent, but it's clunky and not much fun.

Game 442: Battle City

Cover hosted by Mobygames

 

I have no idea how this Japan-exclusive Famicom cartridge got over 50 Mobygames votes - that's not a lot, but it's more than the likes of Balloon Fight and Bomberman. Unlike those, I'd never heard of Battle City before.

This successor follows the same formula as Tank Battalion before it, but with a battery of big improvements.

• Solid near-60fps framerate and responsive controls
• Greater terrain variety
  
• 35 distinct levels with level select option
  
• Level editor with cassette saves
• Two player simultaneous action
• Four enemy tank types with differing levels of speed, armor, firepower, and aggression
• Powerup system
  

 

Since this has a two-player option - one that's implicitly cooperative with you two against the battalion but with a competitive scoring aspect (and the possibility of "accidental" friendly fire), I played this one with "B," who takes player two in the below video.

 

And, well, this is a major improvement over the original! It still doesn't feel very strategic, but I can live with that thanks to much smoother controls and faster gameplay, which makes Battle City feel arcadier than its coin-op predecessor. Levels feel more like battle maps than abstract Pac-Man-like mazes, thanks to zanier designs and terrain variety with features like view-obstructing trees and water which blocks tanks but not your shorts.

The new powerup system also provides a strategic element - killing a super tank will spawn one somewhere in the stage, and these are quite desirable, including effects such as freezing all enemies in place, upgrading your cannon, extra lives, or even just clearing the screen. But it might not spawn in a convenient spot, and they vanish after a few seconds - do you disengage from your current melee to get it, do you keep fighting and try to win quickly enough that you still have time to get it, or do you ignore it?

We played for not quite 20 minutes and made it to level 13 before we got bored and decided to quit. "B" played with a riskier, more aggressive style than myself, where he spawn camped and racked up more kills and points than I did, but also lost his own lives quicker.

GAB rating: Above average.

This was fun, and one of the better early-generation Famicom games I've played. I'm sure that the level editor would have provided lots of replay value back in the day. If it were 1985 and my only gaming system was a Famicom, this would have been one of my favorite video games. But it isn't - it got repetitive eventually, and I'm not at all eager to go back and finish any of the unplayed levels.