Getting It Wrong: Battlezone

Posted by oddbob on April 11, 2008 · Lovingly Filed Under Articles 
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It’s easy to laugh at lacklustre ports of games foisted out into the world by developers and publishers with nary a clue as to what made the original game so absolutely special. For all the time this reporters fading memory stretches back to, he can barely recall a point in time when there wasn’t a flood of poorly ported or abysmally realised games that made their way from one format to another.

For most classic arcade games that received an “official” port in the dark and dusty days of the 8 bits, somewhere a tear was shed. Electric Dream’s official port of Tempest was a mockery, and the less said about the prototype for the 2600 the better. Konami had Nemesis/Gradius obliterated at the hands of the porters. The list, sadly, is endless. More worryingly, the behaviour hasn’t quite died out yet…

Yet few games have ever been treated quite so badly over the years as Atari’s seminal vector game, Battlezone. A one on one battle of wits between man and machine, rendered in glorious minimal vectors. It shouldn’t be that difficult to create something that does the original justice, surely?

Well, you would think not, but clearly something managed to elude everyone ever involved in any form of official port of the game because with scant exception, they’re pretty darn poor.

I can understand fighting against technical limitations. After all, if I’d been the one charged with having to port Battlezone to the Atari 2600 I’d have shit a brick. It’s really no surprise that it turned out an abomination, the hardware clearly isn’t up to the task. But y’know, letting something out the door with the Battlezone name on that looks like this, dear readers…

Battlezone Atari 2600

… it beggars belief, really. Whilst the rest of the home ports may have been nowhere near as garish as the 2600 version, they didn’t really fare much better. Battlezone just isn’t suited to chunky pixels - half of what makes it such a beautiful game is the sparsity provided by the vector graphics. The ominous turning of the wireframe tanks, the distant unreachable (despite mythology pointing otherwise) mountains, like a good horror movie it’s strength lies in what you can’t see.

The Atari Lynx exclusive Battlezone 2000 looked like they were heading along the right tracks until you played it and realised that whoever designed the game had sandwiched in a load of superfluous shite as “extras” - adding a fuel and ammo gauge did the game little in the way of favours instead making it a tedious grindfest where you spent less time in a game of cat and mouse with the enemy, instead spending your life chasing down small items to restock and rearm your tank. Not fun, kids. Not fun.

We don’t speak of the series reboot initiated by Activision, which despite bearing the name of its forefather has precisely squiddly jack shit to do with the game. The fact that it limped along as a franchise long enough to spawn a PSP game is somewhat disturbing considering the first reboot looked dated within 12 months of release and never really shone in it’s sequel.

And so, once more dear readers, we find ourselves on the cusp of a new release of Battlezone. Sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words, which is lucky because I really don’t have the energy to type out the phrase “for fucks sake” over 1,000 times.

Battlezone

You’d be hard pushed to find anything that looks quite as uninspiring wouldn’t you? Grim doesn’t even begin to cover it. Paint by numbers amateur hour is upon us once again, only this time round there’s no Realtime to save us.

In the gaming world though, patience is a virtue. I waited years for a decent version of Pong, the same for Tempest (excluding G-Force) and also for Space Invaders. I’m sure, like those, someday a definitive Battlezone port will come along. I just hope it’s before I’m old and grey.

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One Response to “Getting It Wrong: Battlezone”

  1. the2bears on April 11th, 2008 1:20 am

    That is terrible looking. Truly an abomination.

    Bill

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