The most prominent improvement is that while your position is still restricted to half-a-tile grid, everything moves and runs in rock solid 60FPS, putting it leaps and bounds beyond any iteration of Tank Battalion. This proves to be an issue in stages where there’re no blockages to impede your foes’ course, as you can barely keep up with them because of jerky controls. Both you and enemies can only move half a tile at a time, further hampered by a noticeable delay between your input and your tank reacting to it. The only sound is ambient booming explosion, which is bound to be drown out in middle of beeps and boops from the other arcade cabinets. As such, it’s sometimes a good idea to take a bullet and sacrifice yourself, which resets the round and possibly averts certain disaster.Īlthough Tank Battalion debuted in the same year with Pac-Man and X-Rally, it runs on older hardware than either of those, looking primitive even by 1980 standard.

If it turns to scrap heap, you’re done for, game over, no matter how many lives you saved up. The enemy AI alternates between taking a random detour and making advance on you, but eventually they’ll go after your base at the bottom, represented as an eagle icon, that you must defend at all costs. Another useful tactic is that, much like Space Invaders, you can parry projectiles by firing your own at them, giving the player a safe ground provided you don’t play too recklessly. The walls can be torn down with your unlimited supply of gun, so with a bit of effort you can reform them to your advantage and get into position where you can cover all sidetracks. Each round requires defeating the twenty of them, but they always spawn in spread formation from above, and the screen quickly becomes busy with all the enemies treading through maze-shaped level, making it hard to track them down. You assume a non-descriptive yellow tank, pitted against a battalion of blue tanks that attack en masse.

Battle tanks game old