YMMV / Battlezone (1998)

• Awesome Music: This game has a very subdued, spy-movie sort of score, but it works.
  • And it doesn't waste time. As the first mission opens, and you set out skimming the surface of the moon in your tank, and Earth hangs cold and distant in the lunar sky, you hear this. Before anything else, the game wants you to know that you are all alone in a dead, empty place that does not care about you.
  • What's worth mentioning is that the soundtrack was composed by Jeehun Hwang, the same composer that worked with Gregory Alper to compose the soundtrack to MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, Ghost Bear's Legacy and Mercenaries. Without the tribal drums in some tracks, they would fit right in.
  • The Red Odyssey raises things up a notch, with heavy, triumphant orchestral/electronic overtures.
  • Rise Of The Black Dogs on the N64 has some tracks that sound like remixes of the OST on the PC but some are completely original like the arcade tracks that depend on what side you use. There's even a re-orchestrated soundtrack in the style of the first game and The Red Odyssey found here.
  • The The Blake Robinson Synthetic Orchestra would like to introduce Track 11, Track 12 and Track 08 in a more orchestrated fashion.
  • Before Carey Chico did work on the Battlezone II soundtrack, he made some placeholder military ambiance for the first game for inspiration while it was being developed. While not in the game in any capacity, it still sets the mood.
  • All of these previous examples can easily be played in Battlezone 98 Redux thanks to the Workshop mod system. In particular Blake Robinson himself posted and is working on a mod using his orchestration.
• Difficulty Spike: After the Furies are introduced, losing your tank changes from a minor inconvenience into a death sentence.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Messing around with the weapon mod system can create this. Put dual SP-Stabbers on a couple of basic tanks, and you'll shred through anything short of a hostile Walker.
  • An effective strategy against the AI is to assault the enemy base with a constructor in tow, building power generators and gun towers as you approach it. They have longer range than most vehicle-mounted weapons and high damage.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The physics when vehicles get stuck in each other is hilariously bugged even to this day. Put yourself into a deployed NSDF Recycler, NSDF Factory or CRA Factory then tell it to pack up, watch as one of three things happen, you get sent flying, your vehicle is destroyed and you fly across the entire map as a pilot or you lose your vehicle and die from hitting the insides of the vehicle you're stuck inside of or strike the terrain at high speed. Here's some examples. Sadly patched out as of 98 Redux, now they simply bounce units out when packing up.
  • The Thumper can cause vehicles and buildings to spaz out. The Humongous Mecha is particularly susceptible to being spun like like a top upside down at 200+ RPM when it gets hit by a Thumper wave. This gets taken further if you mess around with infinite ammo and rapid fire, being able to create massive blobs of rolling hills which causes vehicles to spin at ridiculous speeds to the point that hitting the ground is enough to destroy them and send its pilot across the map or to a messy death when they eject (for reference, striking the terrain in a vehicle produces negligible damage otherwise).
  • 98 Redux bugs around with a few cut scenes due to the changes in map boundary handling, the final mission on Mars begins showing the battle between Commander Simmonds' Fifth Platoon and CCA forces outside the map. Normally, AI is allowed outside the map without being bounced back but destroyed vehicles are not, resulting in any vehicles destroyed in that scene being catapulted back toward the map as they explode. This was fixed in a later patch.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A study finding that the asteroid belt consisted of a few ancient planets is not far off from the game's story that the asteroid belt used to be the Chthonian home world, Icarus.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The sound of an enemy vehicle or structure exploding is very satisfying as it means both one less enemy on the field and a helpful pile of scrap to be picked up.
  • The sound of an enemy pilot being splattered, be it running them over or sniping them out of their vehicle.
  • While it's usefulness is questionable, the sound of a SITE Camera being activated and deactivated is a nice sound to listen to.
  • Nothing like the sound of SP-Stabbers, especially two of them on a tank.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Furies are scary enough to fight, even without taking their origins and nature into account. They are described as extremely sadistic, to the point of abandoning what they're doing whenever they get an opportunity to torment an unlucky victim. And when you have to catapult out of your tank, the nearest Fury will swoop down right at you...
  • Then there are Grizzly One's inner thoughts. Imagine, fighting for your life on a distant planet against an implacable foe whom has already in the past destroyed a civilization, with only your own tank and a handful of other soldiers at your side, all of whom are just as terrified and probably going insane as you are.
  • The first Titan level, all that was left of the forces that went ahead of you while busy on Europa were completely wiped out, leaving only three distress beacons. The terrified dialogue coming from rescued units, whose voices otherwise border on Testosterone Poisoning, just shows how much fear the Furies can instill.
  Grizzly Pilot: It was the Furies, commander! The Soviets built them and sent 'em after us! They just kept coming! They're relentless!
  Thunderbolt Pilot: Get me out of here, I'm not going back in! They harvested the rest of my troops and mutilated them! We have to get out of here!
  • "Stranded" in The Red Odyssey ends with the CRA retreating through the portal before self-destructing the last Pegasus on Elysium, leaving you stranded on a planet over 10,000 light years from Sol. The most chilling part is the victory debriefing.
  COMMS RELAY DEVICE V3.2a
  Error:
  No signal reception
  Shutting down...
  C:\>
  • The mission afterward, "Meanwhile, Back On the Ranch..." has you playing as a Sergeant defending an under construction Pegasus to bring back Commander Harris and the Lieutenant. Should the Pegasus be destroyed, your CO sounds absolutely somber as he realizes there's no choice but to surrender... Followed by the sound of a gun cocking, being fired and a body falling to the floor.
• Obvious Beta: Shipped with a completely broken multiplayer component and a plethora of glitches. Most glitches were fixed quickly, but some weren't fixed until the unofficial patches (by the original programmer) started coming out.
• Paranoia Fuel: In the later levels, leaving the safety of your base alone puts you at extreme risk of a Fury swooping down upon you...
• That One Level: The final Titan mission is extremely difficult, mainly because of it being a Luck-Based Mission depending on if the CCA sends you Golem walkers with their blast cannons or you're stuck with Scrap Auxiliaries consisting of nothing more than extra scavengers and Flankers. That and the Furies attack constantly which may be a blessing in disguise if you get free scavengers to pick up the scrap leftover from said attacks.
  • Every single Chinese mission and any Black Dog mission designed by Toni Chaffin in The Red Odyssey. The Chinese campaign is also the only time in the series where AI pilots are capable of sniping, they always target you and they are always tracking you and ready to blast your head off, even if cloaked.
  • "Dire Straights" has you start off piloting a scavenger as punishment until you're reinstated in the midst of a CCA surprise attack on your base, what follows is what could be over half an hour of non-stop combat defending your base.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The game is rated E, yet shows some extremely graphical deaths.

Battlezone II:

• Awesome Music: Body Hammer, the unofficial "theme" of the game's swamp world, Mire. The whole soundtrack is good, opting for a tribal-drum driven score to help emphasize the exotic nature of the Scions or the more orchestral, march like soundtrack for the ISDF.
  • Weather the Storm, a very dark, piano driven theme.
  • Stalking a Sentry sounds amazing and climactic for the Scions.
  • Drive the Rush is probably the most intense sounding theme for combat.
  • Carey Chico released a music pack of unfinished and/or unused songs that didn't make it in due to genre, time constraints or disc space.
    • Unused_scion_old1 is a very slow, mournful piano track.
    • Both Unused_scion_old4 and Unused_scion_old5 feature very triumphant sounding sections.
    • isdf_4 is a slow, mournful march while isdf_6 features the triangle used in the various shell themes.
    • The Early_Ambient tracks really set the mood for their respective planets, particularly Early_Ambient_MIRE which would've been the perfect background track for the mission "Get Help" when you're running past Scion patrols on foot in the middle of the night.
• Broken Base: The final official patch for the original game contained a physics exploit wherein players could jump into the air with a fast vehicle, nose down and hold the reverse button to completely counteract gravity, allowing them to fly around the map while being completely untouchable to AI-controlled enemy units, allowing them to wreck the enemy base with relative impunity. When the community-made patch that eventually became the basis of the official remaster down the line overhauled the physics engine and refused to leave the exploit open, it caused massive outrage among a small but very vocal group of purist veteran players insisting that it was a legitimate gameplay mechanic that should've been left in because it's not cheating if theoretically everyone can do it (whether they are skilled enough to actually pull it off, on the other hand...). The patch developers not sharing their opinion on the matter escalated the argument into the vets complaining that their opinion about how the game should be played isn't worth more than that of the newcomer no-name players, the devs going the extra mile of verifying via testing that it's impossible to roll back the physics engine to the glitchy version without gutting the entire patch, the vets not accepting that as an answer - and the resulting fandom divide endured for over a decade.
• Game-Breaker: Use the vehicle emergency eject system then fire off a jetpack... You can land anywhere on a map.
  • The three weapons in the "Insane" category are deliberately made to be this way. First is the famous Rave Gun that fires multicolored balls to a rave, dealing an insane amount of damage and splash damage, then there's the Fountain Mine that fires ninety missiles into the air, the mine itself detonates in a large explosion and the missiles themselves fire beams at the largest target. Just one fountain is enough to destroy a small base. The final one is Da Bomb!, when dropped it has a thirty second countdown before obliterating everything on the map that isn't indestructible,
• Good Bad Bug: You can climb up a wall on foot. this can lead to some more gamebreaking situations when you can walk behind the enemy base and snipe them.
• Moral Event Horizon: Braddock, and you, if you choose to side with him. Nice job killing your closest friends and wiping out a species, jerk.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Combat Commander is a much less brutal game than 1998 was; you have a limitless source (though limited storage) of biometal from the biometal pools, units as a whole have a lot more health, and your own units are much more competent and less likely to run you over than they were in the first game.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Battlezone II has mixed receptions with fans of the original game; the switch to a more generic UN vs Aliens plot, and the addition of infinite biometal pools are the chief complaints. Many also have flashbacks to the game's initial release, which was bug-infested and would bring computers to their knees.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The game is rated E, yet shows some extremely graphical deaths, including the "Game Over" screen depicting a marine melted into slop and leaking out of his splintered Power Armor.