Video Game / Combat (Atari 2600)

aka: Combat

Tank vs. tank.

Combat was one of the Atari 2600's launch titles, and it came with the console from 1977 to 1982. It was a series of 27 Top-Down View or Side View, Player Versus Player, Shoot Em Ups. It was based on two arcade games from the mid-1970s: Tank (1974) and Jet Fighter.

Each game lasts 2 minutes and 16 seconds, and the object is to hit your opponent more than he hits you.

• Games 1-5: Tank. Drive your tank around, avoid walls or use them as cover, and shoot the other tank. Some of the variations have unguided shells, some have guided missiles.
• Games 6-9: Tank-Pong, in which the shell bounces off the walls. Some variations require that you bounce the shot off at least one wall before it can score a hit.
• Games 10-14: Invisible Tanks, including regular and Tank-Pong variations.
• Games 15-20: Biplane dogfight. Some have clouds that obscure the planes, some have open skies. Some have single-shot rifles, some have shorter range machine guns, and some have guided missiles. One variation gives each player a squadron of two planes, and another pits three fighters against one bomber.
• Games 21-27: Jet dogfight. Like the biplanes, there are variations in clouds, unguided rockets or guided missiles, and squadrons (two-vs-two and three-vs-one).

The difficulty switches are used to handicap the games, shortening the tank shell range or slowing the airplane.

Atari developed a sequel game, Combat II, intended for release in the early 1980s, but it was shelved and didn't see a release until the early 2000s as an Easter Egg with the release of a 2001 PC game named after the original. It features only tank combat. An Atari 5200 homebrew sequel was released, featuring up to four-player gameplay.

Infogrames's 2001 Atari buyout briefly continued a line of modernizing their arcade games for Windows PCs since their ownership under Hasbro. One such game is a budget shooter/platformer developed by Magic Lantern Playware the same year. The player fights all kinds of machines across 30 levels while guiding their hovertank through futuristic environments.

The Atari 2600 Combat provides examples of:

• Asymmetric Multiplayer: The one-vs-three options in the biplane and jet games. The jet version is fair (one side has a larger target, while the other side has more firepower), but the biplanes-vs-bomber variation is not (the bomber is as large as the three biplanes combined, but only has one-third the firepower).
• Colorblind Mode: When the Color/BW switch is set to BW, the game is monochrome.
• Color-Coded Multiplayer: Player 1 is red (Tank), yellow-green (Tank-Pong), peach (Biplanes) or orange (Jets). Player two is blue (Tank), purple (Tank-Pong) or light green (Biplanes/Jets). If the Color/BW switch is set to BW, Player 1 is white and Player 2 is black, regardless of variation.
• Every Bullet is a Tracer: Bullets are one-pixel dots, the same color as the player. (The bomber has a double-sized projectile, not that it helps)
• Fan Sequel: The homebrew Combat II Advanced for the Atari 5200, which includes a 4-player mode and submarine battles.
• No Plot? No Problem!: No mention of who's fighting who, it's just a pastiche of 20th-century warfare.
• One Bullet at a Time: You can't fire another shot until the one you've fired has hit a wall (Tank only, in Tank-Pong they bounce) or run out of range.
• Painfully Slow Projectile: The tanks move very slowly, so it's hard to dodge tank shells. But the biplanes and jets can dodge quite easily.
• Player Versus Player: Two players shooting each other with tanks or airplanes.
• Scoring Points: Each player scores one point every time they hit the other player.
• Side View: The biplane games are seen from the side. This gives them very different controls from the otherwise-similar jet games: down turns the plane left (pulling back on the stick to make it ascend relative to its own axis), and up turns it right (making it descend relative to its own axis). Left and right speed up and slow down the biplane. The jets and tanks have more natural controls (left for left, right for right)
• Tanks, but No Tanks: The tanks don't have turrets, so a player of modern tank games would recognize them as "Turretless Tank Destroyers".
• Timed Mission: 2:16 per round. (More precisely, 8192 frames, where each frame is 1/60th of a second. This comes out to be slightly more than 136.5 seconds.)
• Top-Down View: The tank and jet games are seen from above.
• Wrap Around: The biplane and jet games. You and your bullets wrap around the screen both horizontally and vertically. This allows trick shots where you can shoot through one side of the screen to hit the player on the other side. Also the tank games, if you get shot just right you can warp through the outside wall.

The 2001 Windows PC Combat provides examples of:

• Alien Sky: all over the place. Choosing the "Simple" graphics mode shows skyboxes with hues of weird colors. The "Fancy" mode includes planets (including Earth), moons, black holes, and other phenomena. Dummied Out content even shows water with space whales.
• A Winner Is You: defeating the Darth Tank nets you a credits screen with brief flyovers of some of the levels you've beaten. The sequence ends with your tank flying off into the sunset from the Hub Level and closes with a generic Game Over prompt.
• Bonus Stage: three of them, one for every set of ten levels. All of them have a question-mark powerup to unlock a new tank or give the player an extra life.
  • "Excitable Bike": a straight track with no enemies, ramps, hills and lots of power-ups.
  • "Ghost City": destroy a set of turrets and face down endlessly spawning ghost drones phasing through walls.
  • "Vertigo": a steep-incline slalom where the world's tilted, filled with enemies and few railings.
• Boss Battle: encountered every five levels, in order:
  • The Spinneret: with four puck/cable things that extend and give way to turrets once destroyed.
  • The Gunship: a gunship loaded with turrets as it chases the player down in a huge maze.
  • The Patrollers: two smaller tanks, both racing in one direction on tracks in a globe.
  • The Carrier: a ship that unleashes tons of fighters and deploys a Death Ray once its hangar bays are destroyed.
  • The Buzz Bomb Queen: a big Buzz Bomb that tries ramming the player on top of firing turrets and spawning more of its "children."
  • The Saucer: a flying saucer with more death rays that spawns the game's strongest enemies.
  • True Final Boss\Time-Limit Boss: the Darth Tank, which must be beaten in a minute or it's Game Over.
• Bottomless Pits: everywhere, from the tutorial to the Hub Level. You can lose all your lives before killing a single enemy on New Game Plus runs if you're not careful.
• Camera Screw: the game's biggest weakness. You're only given two third-person viewpoints behind your tank. One is high overhead that lets you see more ground than the battlefield, the other gets you a face full of rear thruster.
• Cyberpunk Is Techno: The aesthetic is too sterile to be called cyberpunk, but the soundtrack goes between a lot of EDM genres from Trance and Ambient to hard-edged Techno.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: some of the other tank models you can unlock are first seen as enemies. Their turrets can rotate and fire much more rapidly unlike the player's tank.
• Death Ray: the Carrier, Buzz Bomb Queen, and Saucer bosses shoot big, loud, blue beams that push the player against the wall, stunlocking them.
• Difficulty Levels: subverted. The enemy AI stays the same while your only difficulty options are changing your maximum health and how many lives you start with.
• Easter Egg:
  • The game files include a copy of the Stella Atari 2600 emulator and roms of Combat and Combat II.
  • The final tank you can unlock by beating the Boss Rush is "Sente": a 3-D replica of the original 2600 tank.
• Flunky Boss: the last three bosses bar the Darth Tank all spawn enemies to keep you occupied.
• Hold the Line: some levels are a small arena with enemies spawning left and right. All you do is wait for the exit sphere to appear.
• Hub Level: starting the game for the first time only gives you access to the first set of ten levels, with subsequent levels unlocked through getting further in the game. Beating the game unlocks a Boss Rush found behind the initial warp. Just be careful not to fall off the elevators; see Bottomless Pits above.
• Interface Spoiler: selecting the player's tank in the options menu reveals four unlockable tanks with their models blacked out. The last is a boxy 3-D model of the original 2600 tank.
• Jump Physics: while the player's tank can't jump on its own, it has a strange relationship between driving along hills compared to ramps and platforms. The tank will stick to hills, no matter how sharp their incline, while it can drive off ramps and hills. Usually into the skybox.
• Last of Its Kind: Defeating the Buzz Bomb Queen leads to its "children" disappearing from the last five levels. See The Swarm below for more details.
• Leap of Faith: lots of powerups, secret warps, and other goodies require the player to skirt along barriers and railings, speed off into the skybox and stop on a dime to areas outside the main level's reach.
• Locked Door: All over the place. The only way to unlock them is by reaching a kill quota of a certain enemy.
• Mechanical Lifeform: the Buzz Bomb Queen, judging by its cries of pain and ability to reproduce more Buzz Bombs.
• Mercy Invincibility: every time you get hit or lose a life, you're protected for 3-5 seconds.
• Neon City: the third "VR" tileset with black tiles accented by saturated purples, blues and greens. The first tileset also has cool indigo metal tiles on top of concrete.
• No Plot? No Problem!: You're a hovertank. There are lots of other machines out there to blow you up. Kill 'em before they kill you.
• No OSHA Compliance: not that there's a safety board in the nondescript future, but there are lots of elevators and platforms without railings or barriers waiting for you to trip up.
• Pacifist Run: Subverted. bar the bosses, you can complete most levels without firing a single shot. Doing so will net you a 3000-point "Pacifist Bonus." You still have to kill certain enemies, some with the Smart Bomb power-up. Other levels give you no such thing.
• Painfully Slow Projectile: Your tank and everything else that shoots fires these. Death rays are the game's only hitscan weapons.
• Pinball Scoring: the player can collect scoring multipliers up to 99x collected point value until the next time they get hit.
• Power-Up: a stock assortment including point bonuses, extra lives, Super-Speed, an Invisibility Cloak, a shield covering your tank, and lots of shot upgrades.
  • BFG: Supergun, which amps up your shots' explosive power.
  • More Dakka: a double shot and a triple shot that can be combined with the Bounce and Supergun upgrades.
  • Pinball Projectile: Bounce, which turns your shots into bouncing blue balls of doom.
  • Smart Bomb: a power-up that detonates once the player's tank rolls over it to destroy surrounding enemies.
• Ramming Always Works: Buzz Bombs, Rocket Drones, and spinning Percussion Bombs in the last three levels.
• Sentry Gun: both stationary and mobile.
  • Stationary turrets come in a small gray, a medium beige, and a large purple variant.
  • In addition to Mini-Boss tank variants, Flyers and Hunters can take potshots at the player. Flyers use the same slow 3-round burst as medium turrets, Hunters shoot a much faster projectile every 3 seconds.
• Shout-Out:
  • The first bonus level is called "Excitable Bike", complete with a straight course with lots of ramps and hills homaging the NES game's track.
  • Dev team notes list the name "Gernsback" for the tileset used in levels 11-20.
  • A few to Star Wars. The fourth boss level for the Carrier is named "The Guns, They've Stopped". It's also the first level you face a boss with a Death Ray. The Buzz Bombs even have side-mounted engines similar to X-Wings.
  • Beating the Boss Rush unlocks the "Sente" tank, named for Nolan Bushnell's post-Atari company Sente Technologies. Like "Atari", "Sente" is another term derived from the board game Go, meaning "having the initiative." See Easter Egg for more details.
• Speedrun Reward: two point bonuses for finishing any level under a time limit: a 3000-point "Jet Bonus" for under 30 seconds and a more elusive 5000-point "Lightning Bonus" for under 10 seconds.
• Stuff Blowing Up: every boss fight ends with a spectacular, bright white explosion that leaves behind randomized life and point bonuses.
• Suicide Attack:
  • Rocket Drones, which lock onto the player's tank, accelerate to intercept, and are destroyed on impact.
  • the spinning Percussion Bombs that always explode when destroyed, leaving behind a powerful shockwave lasting a second that can still hurt the player.
• The Swarm: Buzz Bombs, the first mooks you encounter. They act like bees as they hover around and harass your tank including their queen. The level before reaching the queen requires the player to destroy 500 Buzz Bombs to unlock the door to the warp sphere. Thankfully, there's more than enough firepower laying around. The damage done between the swarm and the Queen presumably eradicates them for good.
• Tank Controls: natch. The player can strafe, turn, and use an emergency brake.
• Warp Zone: the player completes levels by going into black exit orbs with two white lightning lines. Other kinds of exit orbs have different colors of lightning.
  • Blue lightning: Bonus Level
  • Red lightning: Boss Battle
  • One hidden orb on the first level with green lightning sends you right to the first boss.

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BOSS

"OBSCURE GAME"

DEFEATED!

TIME: TOO DAMN LONG

A NEW RECORD!